CRITICAL EXCHANGE #17: WINTER, 1985

GENERAL EDITOR James J. Sosnoski

GUEST EDITOR James Creech

ASSOCIATE EDITOR R. L. Wadsworth Jr.

INTRODUCTION James Creech

DECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICAS AN INTERVIEW WITH JACQUES DERRIDA James Creech, Peggy Kamuf - and Jane Todd 1

MNEMOSYNE: ZWEITE FASSUNG Friedrich Halderlin

RESPONSE TO JACQUES DERRIDA'S "MNEMOSYNE: A LECTURE FOR PAUL DE MANn Andrew Parker* 35 DECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA1 HEIDEGGER READING HmERLlN Andrzej Warminski 4 5 JAMES CREECH

In April of 1984 The Society for Critical Exchange sponsored a colloquium with Jacques Derrida at Miami University. During Pro- fessor Derrida's visit he was interviewed in French by James Creech, Peggy Kamuf and Jane Todd of the Miami University French Department. A translation of that interview is contained in the present volume. It is followed by the remarks of Andrew Parker and Andrzej Warminski, two of the respondents participating in a panel discussion after Professor Derridals address the following day. Although that address is not printed here-it is entitled Wnemosyne"and can be read in a forthcoming issue of Critical Inquiry--these responses make a significant statement that can be read by themselves. They have the added virtue of describing very well the discursive field in which Derridafs remarks on Paul de Man, memory and mourning can be situated. As for the interview, it was agreed in advance that it would focus on the question of "Deconstruction in America," and Professor Derrida received a list of written questions on the afternoon before the interview the following morning. A significant portion of the questions were spontaneous, however, as will be obvious to the reader. In transcribing and translating this discussion I have attempted to reproduce its conversational tone, with all the interruptions, ellipses, suspensions and laughter that marked a very cordial and freeform discussion. Essentially nothing has been edited out, and the reader can follow the sub-text of associations which lead from one moment of the discussion to another. Although the interview was in French, some words and phrases were inevitably spoken in English because the discussion was often about things American. To preserve the differential quality of those words I have printed them in bold face type. I would like to thank my colleagues Peggy Kamuf and Jane Todd for generously suggesting ways of improving this translation, and Jacques Derrida for his kindness in reviewing the French tran- scription. INTRODUCTION

SUMMARY

Here is a topical summary of the major issues that were discussed:

Deconstruction's "place" in America as distinct from Europe or France. The importance of the campus. The American tradition as a context in which deconstruction has had such a remarkable impact. The importance of religious traditions for understanding DECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA: deconstruction in America. The relatively new field of decon- structive theology. American criticisms of deconstruction, with AN INTERVIEW WITH JACQUES DERRIDA specific reference to Edward Said concerning deconstruction's "anti- &ferentiality." JAMES GREECH, PEGGY KAMUF AND JANE TODD Derrida's notion of translation and its possible importance in understanding both the provenance and the effect of deconstruction in America. PEGGY KAMUF: In accepting our invitation to come here to Miami, The relation of deconstruction and feminism, and the possible you suggested the tops "Deconstruction in America" as a frame for role of the feminine in writing. our discussions. In the lecture we are going to hear tomorrow, you make it a point not to Wefine these words," since as you say the James Creech gesture of wanting to define "is by definition exactly what defines the Miami University enemy of deconstruction, someone who, at least out of ambivalence, would like to exhaust it [la fatiguer], use it up, turn the page." would contrast this simple gesture of wanting to define decon- struction with the necessity you have pointed to since your earliest writings for deconstruction's "double gesture.I1 More specifically, I'm thinking of the double gesture you outline in "The Principle of Reason." There, you first explain how and why the university can easily adapt to apparently revolutionary discourse which leaves intact the fundamental principles of all academic or scientific discourse--even the most conservative. You then go on to situate the terrain of the double gesture which you say "insures professional competence and the most serioue tradition of the university even while going as far as possible theoretically and practically in the most directly underground thinking that appears unsituable, and thus unbearable, to certain university professionals in every country who join ranks to foreclose or to censure it by all available means." Although the effects of this censure can be found in all countries, aren't there effects which are quite specific to the United States where the university institution very often presents itself-as it does here [at Miami University] for example-as set apart, well defined in its proper place* its campus, whose limits are often clearly marked? What relation do you see between this topographical representation and the fact that deconstruction provokes such strong reactions of censure and exclusion? What in your opinion is being denied in this representation of the university in its proper place?

JACQUES DERRIDA: Thank you. There are a large number of fundamental questions here and it would be too ambitious for me to

[CRITICAL EXCHANGE #17 (Winter, 1985), pp. 1-33] 2 JACQUES DERRIDA

try and answer them all. I'm going to try to follow a thread that I perceive on first reading, basically the thread indicated by the word JACQUES DERRIDA 3 Y~pos.~Your question begins with the topos "deconstruction in America," and goes on to talk about the topographical representation the lecture when I decided to go very slowly, much more cautiously of the American campus and its proper place. If I were to try and than can be done when improvising either in a lecture or an interview, summarize your question without simplifying too much or doing too in trying to approach this phenomenon which is so enormous. much violence to it, I would say fundamentally that it is asking what Enormous not in itself, because let's not forget that in spite of takes place with deconstruction. What takes place and where does it everything what we are talking about is a small thing going on among take place? So, it begins with the question of its American place. a minority and in the very closed milieux of certain American universities. Therefore, without exaggerating the importance of the P. KAMUF: Yes. phenomenon in itself, let's say that it's the symptom-the small symptom--of something whose proportions I believe are considerable. J. DERRIDA: It's true that I suggested we situate our discussion And to gauge its dimensions I would have to undertake analyses that I around the question mdeconstructionin Arneri~a,~but as you know, in can't undertake here. the lecture I'm going to give tomorrow, I explain at the same time why There is another moment in the argumentation of the lecture I must avoid that question-in a manner that is altogether as which I develop in order to excuse myself, in sum, for not keeping my deliberate, as thought-out, as analytical as possible. Although I can't promise and for not responding to the demand placed on me: one take up all the arguments that justify that avoidance, I want to say a finally realizes that there is no deconstruction in America quite few words about it all the same. Partly because I believe it's simply because once one takes into account that the United States is necessary to clarify a large number of preconditions or protocols, in today the place where deconstruction, or the reaction against order to speak about deconstruction in Amellica. deconstruction, has spread more markedly than anywhere else in the I believe that a rigorous analysis of what is happening in the world, then at that point one can't give a meaning to the name that very symptom. And United States around this word, this gesture and this movement mAmericamunless one takes into account cannot be explained without mobilizing an analysis that also focuses consequently, I would say that the United States today is a place where something like this can take place. (And moreover, it is on the history of this country, its religious and moral tradition. We can't understand the reception that deconstruction has had in the remarkable that at least in a timid and scattered fashion, the word United States without background-historical, political, religious, and deconstruction" has appeared in certain political contexts, as well ae so forth. I would say religious above all. (And such an analysis in certain newspapers like The Wall Street Journal... ) So the place can't be attempted impromptu like this.) So we can't understand what itself is defined in this context on the basis of the symptom which is is going on regarding this issue without studying not only very long produced there. sequences of American history, but also a shorter sequence which is So for me, the United States today is a place where something the history of the American university institution-I would say the like deconetructforrin its academic and its political dimensions- reverberates in an altogether surprising way. And when I try to ask history of the profession. I think that things happened between, let's say, 1960 and 1980 in the profession of literary and philosophical myself where all this is taking place, I then perceive the United study, things that aren't without connection to the evolution of the States as a place where it is occurring much more, in a more lively market, to the economic and political sphere-the number of jobs, etc. and sensitive way than anywhere else-that I know of. Morerso than I'm persuaded that an analysis could show that all this comes in Europe. In other words, I think Umberto Eco was to a large extent play in both the positive and negative reception given decon- right when, in an interview with the French newspaper LiMration, he ction, in the defense against it as well as in the acceptance said that deconstruction is first of all an American phenomenon and that it is perceived in Europe as an American product. I myself find t should be emphasized after all-has indeed been stronger in United States than anywhere else. The reaction is ambiguous and in Europe that with the exception of France (although even in France ally strong in both directions. So I can only repeat what I said in to a small degreebbut especially in Germany and in Italy-- deconstruction is known as an American import.

P. KAMUF: I see. 4 JACQUES DERRIDA

J. DERRIDA: Even my own work within the field of deconstruction is received very often on the basis of the American reception. So something has happened in the United States which is not a simple translation or importation of something European. I believe it has an JACQUES DERRIDA 5 absolutely new and original dimension in the United States, and therefore all the more difficult to put together. I don't think that is absolutely essential, but all the more difficult to circum- there is something like one deconstruction. There are very diverse, scribe and to isolate. heterogeneous phenomena which resemble each other, which in a way So, getting back to the question of the university place. Let's come together under that name, but only to a certain point. So we skip over the intermediary question. We'll come back to it later. My also have to take this great diversity into account. Yes, interrupt feeling is that, in effect, what distinguishes the United States for me me... from a European place, from this particular point of view, is that all intellectual and cultural life is concentrated-in any case to a large P. KAMUF: I think that, in this question, I underscored the words degreein the university. "oposn and "place" as you noticed, because, as I said, in the American institution there is this tradition of the university apart, and of the P. KAMUF: Yes. university community apart. And obviously, I was also thinking of your analysis in "The Principle of Reason-hich sets out from James J. DERRIDA: It's very different from my experience in France where, Siegel's topographical parable. I agree that there is no one paradoxically, my move was to addrese myeelf over and above the deconstruction. But I suppose I was trying to get at the limit of this university to an intellectual or cultural or literary milieu which was closed space---or this space which aspires to being, sees itself, not defined by its links to the academy. From this point of view, represents itself as being in its proper place: I was asking whether deconstruction wae a kind of departure from the university, with all it is not precisely here, at the borderline, in this encounter, that the consequences that may have had for me. In the United Statee on deconstruction defines itself, necessarily somehow, for and by the the other hand, everything is concentrated within the academic American institution. That was my point. institution, such that the intensity of the resonance provoked by deconstruction is all the greater because such a situation con- J. DERRIDA: Yes, 1'11 come to that aspect of the question. But just centrates both positive and negative resonance together in the same a parenthesis before we get there. space. What strikes me when the question you raise is centered This academic concentration exptaine why deconstruction around the question of place is a certain type of deconstructive reverberated much more strongly here than in France. In France it thinking, at least the kind that has interested me personally more and had an impact very quickly, but right away it dispersed and there more for some time now: that is, precisely, the question and the were moves to interpret, to censure, to misread, to disassociate, but enigma of event as that which takes place [qui a lieu1,the question of also to combine. Moves proportional to the diversity of intellectual the enigma of place. And here we have to procexery, very slowly milieu, of interests, schools, cliques--which weren't university and very, very cautiously when we ask ourselves what we really cliques. They all had to do with the university, but they weren't mean by place, Thinking about the question of place is a very composed purely of academics. So deconstruction found itself difficult thing-as is thinking about event as something whicb takes dispersed right away, channeled into a highly diversified place. place. It's finally a question of the topikos in the rhetorical sense, While in the United Statee, since everything goes on in the as a localizing of what comes to pass in the sense of event, of university (and I would even say in several department8 of the Erei is My reference to Heidegger is often a reference to those university which, despite the size of the country, are very close to &A &A Heideggerne thought where the question of place is very each other, with information circulating very, very fast inside a alive and very mysterious too. All this means that the question of relatively homogeneous milieu), there was right away a greater intensity of reception in the positive sense of the term. and also. juat as great an intensity of reaction, of rejection. Consequently, I have the paradoxical feeling that everything being done here under the heading deconstruction has a much greater chance of being heard and received than in Europe, precieely at the moment when it is encountering the most violent resistance. Many indications today 6 JACQUES DERRIDA give us cause to think that in its violence, the reaction has reached a JACQUEs DERRIDA 7 point and a style---above all a style (we could talk about that)--which I think constitute an event in the tradition of the American academic or in tension with one another. If this tension is not maintained then, ethic in particular, All of a sudden people are beginning to in my opinion, the very force of deconstruction is extenuated every transgress the rule of their own declared deontology. time. Now, twice in your question you talk about double gesture, but P. KAMUF: Yes, that's really striking. I would say that the double doesn't designate the same thing each time. There's the double gesture which has become-and this I J. DERRIDA: It's a sign that some nerve has been touched. Of regret-a kind of procedural or methodological schema which consists course there are analogous things in Europe. I could cite examples. in saying basically what I once ventured very hastily in Positions, But just now I have the impression that here in America quite violent namely that there are two gestures, one which consists in over things are going on in this regard. turning, the other which consists in displacing. It's become... Now, to get back to the campus limits, I believe that they do explain the potential for impact [retentissement] because, as we're P. KAMUFr It's formula. realizing more and more clearly, deconstruction gets at the foundation and the axiomatice of the institution. This could be J. DERRIDA: It's a kind of formula. I'm not disavowing the formula, demonstrated. But also because, here and there, it establishes but still, as soon as it beconies a technique in the instrumental sense, connections between the interiority of the institution and the outer it can't work. Nevertheless, I believe that what was indicated in this social sphere. Deconstruction makes such, a connection not only by double gesture is necessary. So on the one hand there is what calling into question the interdepartmental limits and so forth (which appears to be this technique. But there is no deconstruction without isn't very novel), but above all by raising the question of the relations questioning of technique, without returning to the question of between the university and the social sphere. And even if it's not technique (which you'll see I try to do in tomorrow's lecture), without absolutely new as. a thesis, as a proposition, or in terms of the . recalling that deconstructions can't be reduced, can't let themselves content of the proposition (we'll return to that question in a moment), be lnstrumentalized and become a method of literary criticism, for I thtnk it is new enough as a praxis [manihre de fairef, as a way of example, or a method for reading philosophical texts. At that point, it proceeding, or writing, etc., for the forces with an interest in is already "falsen or nwrongn to transform the double gesture into a protecting themselves inside of the university to feel very threatened device, a technical procedure. It's already insufficient. and to react with the violence we were just .talking about. Now the other double gesture you allude to is really, more than I wanted to return to the question that you ask in the middle a strategy, a kind of affirmation that is very important to me about the definition of the double gesture. It is true that it's personally. (Here I wouldn't want to appear to be speaking in the difficult to define the one deconstruction (faddconstruction], and not name of the one deconstruction. I'm just saying how I experience, only because it is Kally, I believe, a rather heterogeneous how I see these things.) Personally I believe--I believe-that we have movement. Personally I would even say that its best interests are to run the risk of raising even the questioneat are most served by keeping that heterogeneity-although I don't know whose threatening for the university, for the institution, for the solidity of interests or what interests these are. But if deconstruction has an the academic institution, for the respiration of the university. interest then this heterogeneity has to persist, otherwise it would be And then at the same time, I feel very "traditionalistn in a precisely the end of deconstruction. certain way because I am for memory, history, and in sum, everything Deconstruction is also difficult to define because it is neither of which the university is the guardian. That's it. The mission of a system nor a unified discourse. It's as you say a multiplicity of the university is, in a word, to assure the memory of culture, of gestures, of movements, of operations. And what's more, multiplicity thought, of philosophy. And I am for the protection of this mission. is essential for each of these gestures, that is, simultaneously What's more, I'd even go so far as to say that the university's mission carrying out several gestures which can seem either contradictory will be all the better protected if we don't place limits on questioning, even if it may seem destructive or tiresome or subversive. There again, this double gesture Is very difficult to sustain because it can JACQUES DERRIDA 9 8 JACQUES DERRIDA lack a philosophical tradition here, fn any case of a tradition such as lead to untenable situations of contradiction and @doublebind." there exists in France. And yet-perhaps because there is this lack Personally, I live this double gesture as a sort of rapid alternation, of tradition-the United States was receptive to this movement that doing both as fast as possible. [LAUGHTER] But I suppose that at emerges in a certain fashion from the European philosophical the same time it's this duplicity, if one can call it that, which makes tradition. Why is that? How did this come to be? Why has it deconstructive gestures unbearable to... happened in literature departments where the philosophical tradition is especially weak? And secondarily, could you respond to the P. KAMUF: ...to the traditionalists... critics who say, as you no doubt know, that deconstruction is precisely a movement made up of people who don't have a sufficient J. DERRIDA: ...to the traditionalists, because they would like to be background in the the tradition to appreciate and to know what they able to say that everything called deconstruction is simply de- are doing. And that, because it is cut off from the roots of a certain structive and incompetent, and that basically people who do it forget philosophical tradition, deconstruction becomes superficial and #for the memory of the university, destroy the criteria of reading, destroy m~laic,~to go back to what we were saying before. competency and seriousness, And when they realime that it's not quite so simple, and that they have to deal with people who know, who J. DERRIDA: Yes. There again, it's a very, multiple multiform also have a certain competency, well, then things become absolutely question. There are several points of ent ry... catastrophic and they fly off the handle. Personally, that's one of the things +at interests me a lot in J. CREECH: This would be a question not of place, of the campus, the United States because, to get back to what we were saying a but a question of tradition, of the reception within a tradition. And moment ago, in France that particular dilemma couldn't be felt with thus it becomes a question of translation which is also something such intensity since there are always avant-garde milieux involved in which we might want to discuss. experimental research into literature, philosophy and so forth, which claim to be anti-university but always in a rather frivolous manner. J. DERRIDAa Yes. I think that to get at this question which is That's because they don't see in what way, in spite of everything, they altogether vital, altogether central, it is necessary to increase the depend on the university. They need the university to assure their points of entry. And one of the possible entrances is first of all the own archives, and thus their own history. They need for people to fact that the firet texts making use of deconstruction in Europe, for write theses on them. example, were texts which took very seriously the question of In France, as soon as academics can associate, let's say, literature, texts which had to give an account of themselves in the deconstruction with these avant-garde movements outside the uni- face of literature [qui s'expliquaient avec la litttrature] and which versity-1 remember very well this moment in my own little history- considered certain operations, certain literary events as decisive for they say, @That'sTel Quel. That's Derrida outside the university, so posing questions of a deconstructive sort to philosophy. That you those people are incompetents. .. " While here, where everything know. No need to insist on it, So for that reason it was normal that takes place on the inside, it becomes something very critical and literature departments be sensitive to deconstruction-which is a painful within the body of the university to see people who ask these coming-to-terms with literature. questions and sustain such discourse as members of the profession. Another entrance into the question-I'm not going to say much Which means that paradoxically, in the great body of the United States about it, but I think it could be done--another entrance might have to the questions of deconstruction become concentrated, attain a kind of do with what has happened in the relatively recent history of literary intensity, that they don't attain elsewhere. studies in America. (But here I'm even more incompetent to talk % about it.) I think 'New Criticism, for example--a certain type of JAMES CREECH: Perhaps we could take up yet another question that attention, "close reading,. tending a bit towards formalistic, anti- is linked to to the one you have just dealt with. In the United States historicist issues, etc.--was one of the premises preparing the way deconstruction has been accepted up to now primarily in literature for deconstruction. Even if the period of New Criticism was over by departments, and not in philosophy departments. As you know, we 10 JACQUES DERRIDA 1 JACQUES DERRIDA 11 ! and large, it prepared people, readers and students, for certain 1 the same thing: "it's going on somewhere else." (That's what Bate has reading practices associated with deconstruction. That's one thread in common wit4 Wellek. Without reading a page of what they're that could be followed. I'm unable to do it myself, but I'm convinced talking about, they have the same diagnosis: It's philosophy, and it's it could be done. On the other hand it is true that, in principle, bad philosophy.) They form what in France we call a "cordon people in literature departments aren't as prepared to receive sanitaire,"that is, they want to surround the locus of the infection, philosophical discourses, discourses very rich in philosophy. But at the epidemic, in order to avoid the contagion. The key to deciphering the same time, literature departments in the United States-certain of this symptom is that when the philosophers say that "it's going on them in any case-are at the outset more free of traditional somewhere else," that the problem lies in the literature departments, prejudices associated with philosophy, more free of resistances you can be E, you can establish undeniably, that it's beginning to regarding continental philosophy. Moreover, the way into continental occur in the philosophy departments. What makes them so nervous is philosophy can pass under the heading "English Romanticism," for that, indeed, it is beginning not only in the philosophy departments, example, which inside and outside the United States is, after all, but even in the centers within these departments that were associated with readings of Hegel and the German philosophers. So traditionally linked to analytical philosophy. Even there a certain here, a whole sensitivity was already prepared and waiting. interest in deconstruction is developing, And that's what is making But then one has to consider the fact that in the literature people very nervous. I don't know if I've answered your questions ... departments there has been rejection as well as acceptance. The impact of deconstruction also stems from a moment of rejection4 And J. CREECH: A moment ago you said that the reception of decon- the rejection has been very classically the rejection by literary scholars of things theoretical and philosophical. (I say "very struction in the United States had something ,to do with religion. Although you added that you didn't want to take up that question now, classicallyn because it resembles what went on in France and in it piqued my curiosity and I wonder if you could even vaguely situate Europe in general.) "That stuff is philosophy, we don't want any part If not we could go on to some of it.Vn France, in the literature departments, that's always the the issue, if that would interest you. way it happens. So, resistance to theory. Resistance to things other questions. European. Not only to individuals from Europe, but even to J. DERRIDA: 1'11 try to do it in what will naturally be a very Americans who are more "European" than others. I am thinking of the role played by Paul de Man, who was both European, very open to inadequate and summary manner. continental philosophy, to the European literary tradition, and who J. CREECX; Fine. played a decisive role in the American formation of deconstruction. Thus we find oursefves faced with a paradoxical situation J, DERRIDA: We must look In two directions. On the one hand, as where in certain literature departments deconstruction is rejected you know, the teaching of religion, and above all its institution, is as a theoretical and philosophical thing, while symmetrically, recip- something very strong in the universities of this country. It exists rocally, philosophers who are American by traditiomr at least non- in Europe too, but to a lesser degree and it isn't as integrated into continental, non-European-reject deconstruction as a thing good only the academic tradition. Now, when faced with deconstruction, to the for literature people. The poor literature types, in other words, extent that it is an integral part of the most rooted, the most solid, have become victims of a kind of philosophical mystification, an the most fundamental academic culture, the instruction of theology Import product, contraband that they were not solidly enough prepared to criticize. And that's the situation we're in today. and of religion naturally finds itself called to task--not necessarily threatened however; It's complicated-but at least sees itself Here is one possible reading of these symptoms. At the provoked by questions concerning all of metaphysics, morality and so present moment, big-name professors 1e.g. Bate and Wellek] rep- on. There is doubtless the impression that the socio-ethico-political resenting the grand tradition of literary studies are allying ground is actually threatened by something which it would Ilk? to themselves with other big-name professors 1e.g. Danto and Searle] condemn as being both atheistic and immoral. And as you know, the representing the dominant tradition in philosophy, and both are saying criticisms or the critical insinuations regarding deconstruction have JACQUES DERRIDA JACQUES DERRIDA 13 always had a moral or a moralizing aspect to them. Deconstruction is accused of corrupting academic morals, and sous-emteufu, of corrupting morals period, in the most sexu* sense of the term. cloistering of departments. This religion department is perceived by Now, because of this the protestant, theological ethic which 1 other departments-English, philosophy-as a little unsettling. So marks the American academic world acted all the more "responsibly," from the institutional point of view as well, I believe the study of the basically taking deconstruction more seriously than was possible in religious, theological dimension in the American university can go a Europe. Or rather in Europe, paradoxically, the dismantling of the long way towards explaining what is going on with deconstruction. religious element was already further along. In a word, the European cultural milieu was basically less protected than the J. CREECHI Edward Said [The World, the Text, and the Critic American milieu, and that might explain the negative sensitivity. (Cambridge: Harvard ~niversity~r=l987J, pp. 188-190.)aises a But there is a positive sensitivity which 1 believe can also be question that is perhaps of some interest as an intelligent form- explained by religion, by theology. Currently, in publications, etc., ulation of an issue often raised by American academics not receptive there are emerging many indices of a deconstructive theology to your work. What is "the mediating agency between base and movement.1 To talk about it seriously we would have to analyze a superstructuren that, Said assumes, is presupposed by your critique whole history of exegesis, of modem hermeneutics in German and of Western metaphysics? How is logocentrism in or a governing European protestant thought, centering around Heidegger, Karl instance of, both the writer and the Western metaphysics'that would Barth, etc. But in general, to summarize very succinctly, the point control the writer, enclosinghim? By what %agencyt' is logocentrism would seem to be to liberate theology from what has been grafted on translated and transmitted from tradition to writing subjects in to it, to free it from its metaphysico-philosophical super ego, so as to different times and different places? uncover an authenticity of the mgospel,mof the evangelical message. And by extension, how can a writer, such as yourself, be And thus, from the perspective of faith, deconstruction can at least outside logocentricism to that marginal extent required to int to it? be a very useful technique when Aristotelianism or Thomism are to be And here, let me say that I chose this criticism because it F-oes echo a criticized or, even from an institutional perspective, when what needs number of other people with whom you're certainly familiar. The to be criticized is a whole theological institution which supposedly question of agency however Is certainly a crucial one. has covered over, dissimulated an authentic Christian message. And [the point would also seem to be] a real possibility for faith both at J. DERRIDA; You know, I wonder whether Said's question, for the margins and very close to Scripture, a faith lived in a venturous, mulated like that, is really more intelligent than the criticisms of dangerous, free way. I know theologians who are doing this, and who nacademics not receptive to my work," whether it shows more applaud deconstruction, who need deconstruction, not against their receptivity. Judging from the difficulty that I am having in entering faith but in service of their faith, against a certain theology, even into the formulation of these questions, I would say that there is not against a certain academic, theological institution. There are much receptivity. But once again, too hastily and too summarily, I'll conflicts within the sphere of American theology. They're not very try to respond-so to speak. visible or very developed, but they are certainly taking place and in First, to formulate the question in these terms- "mediation," my opinion they're taking place at the points where the most work is Mbase,~superstructure,"-isalready to disregard everything I've being done within the theological field. tried to put forth on this subject, if I may say so. I do not believe I've just come from Williams College, where I was invited by a that today one can, simply, analyze anything whatever while calmly department of religion. That department was the locus within the trusting the difference between an infrastructure and a super university, or so it seemed to me, where the most work was going on structure. It's not that I think this distinction is simply without in new areas-courses on psychoanalysis, on Lacan, on decon- pertinence8 it does have its pertinence. It can even be useful up to a But at the point where a deconstructive analysis struction, on anthropology, on Uvi-Strauss, on literature too. In a certain point. word, it was the place where the most risks were being taken enters, this opposition cannot be considered as guaranteed, or as as a relative to the traditional focus of the academy, relative to the thing in which one can have confidence. For that matter, I don't even think that a.mandst can have... I don't even consider this question a mandst question. It's ltmamoid,"but it's not marxist. JACQUES DERRIDA 1 JACQUES DERRIDA 15

Once I say that there is onfy conveyance and mediation, and [GENERAL LAUGHTER] therefore that there is only text, I can no longer respond to "what is I the mediating agency?" Said, if he were "receptive to my work,. I1 don't. believe1 that a mamist can talk about nmediation%tween ought to take an interest in what I say about the question .what is?., infrastructure and superstructure. "Agency," what does that mean, because the implications would take him well beyond the point where literally? How would you translate it [into French], because I don't he could placidly ask, "where do you situate the mediation between really understand... infrastructure and superstructure?"%, I can't respond to the J. CREECH: I don't think that it's the Aristotelean term exactly. 1 question #what is?". This kind of structure which I call "text," or think that it simply suggests something which would assure "tracen--or here, to adopt to Said's language, .agency," "mediati+ conveyance [le transport], for example conveyance of a text into the goes far enough to call into question the very form of the ontological world, of a philosophical or textual tradition into an individual. So it question, the authority of the question "hat isll', far enough so that also raises the whole question of the referentiality of the text, of the we can't in all tranquility ask "u'est-ce que c'est?" possibility of historital action, and thus the possibility for a politics To come next to the question of the text-to what I mean when I of deconstruction. I think that all that lies behind the question. say, "it's only textM... I've read Said by the way-well, not all, I've read a little of him. And when I reread the questions, the objections J. DERRIDA: Yes. That's why this question, in sum, relays your that you quote here, or when it is said about the deconstructive other question on what is "outsidem[cf. +low, p. 181. perspective that there is nothing outside the text, then I say to myself8 If deconstruction real1 consisted in saying that everything J. CREECH: Yes. happens in books, it woul-a? It deserve five minutes of anybody's attention. When these people pret'end-a&&Y all do (Foucault does, J. DERRIDA: Well, to answer of course in a very abstract and hyper- Said does>-to believe that sswhat deconstruction means, then I formalized manner, because we don't have time to go through the say that if the academy were still governed by ethics, such a thing labor of nmediationt' which would be necessary, I would say that from ought to be... severely punishedl my point of view, everything is, precisely, in the "mediation." That is to say that everything is in the conveyance [le transport]. Convey- [GENERAL LAUGHTER] ance is $- there is between what he is calling infrastructure and superstructure; [there is only] translation in the most open sense of Really.. . The argument that Said sets out to criticize-iat least the the word, metaphorleation in a sense that can't be simply reduced to manner in which the argument is carried out-can certainly be the narrow rhetorical meaning. So I would begin with mediation, and criticized. One can criticize the proposition that text is all there is, I would say that that's all there is, with an extreme differentiation in or that the text can't be limited to writing inside books. One could the processes of "mediating agency." There is no pure infra- criticize the proposition that we should reconstruct the concept of structure. There is no pure superstructure. There is only text. text and writing in order to be able to say that the economic Now, if I say such a thing in that way... infrastructure is text, for example. Now, you may be unhappy about these propositions, but if you are going to criticize them, at least you J. CREECH: there will be Walter Jackson Bate who is going to... have to recognize that that is what is being said. It is incumbent on you to try to see it seemed strategically useful at a given [GENERAL LAUGHTER] moment to say, for example, "a body is text, the table is text, the market-Wall Street, etc.-is text." Or else, "nuclear arms are text." J. DERRIDA: Right ... and we're goint to try to answer since the That seemed strategically useful at a given moment. And I believe ground rule of our discussion here is that we can respond very that it has in fact been useful. So, it's everything but a text- quickly and very directly concerning things which are really very ualization in the sense that Foucault and Said want to represent It. complicated, which would require time. And even less is it a ndiscursivization," if one can clay that. 16 JACQUES DERRIDA JACQUES DERRIDA 17 Because one must not forget this huge fact that the beginnings of deconstruction were a critique of logocentrism. That is, -exactly the Therefore, what is said about Iogocentrism is said from a certain opposite of a reduction to phenomena of language. Nonetheless, all inside of logocentrism. But it is an inside that is divided enough and these people we are talking about here, all these criticisms, have in tormented enough and obsessed enough by the other, by contra- common that they present deconstruction as an enclosure @in the dictions, by heterogeneity, for us to be able to say things about it prison house of la~guage,~which is-I don't know how to qualify it- without being simply "outside of it." And we say them within the blindness, bad faith, a stubborn refusal to read, which is an enormous grammar, within the language of logocentrism while allowing the symptom. alterity or the difference which obsesses this inside to show through. Perhaps we can try to approach these formulations and to The proof that it's possible is that it is done, it happens, and it answer and respond after all in a little more pointed fashion to what happens often enough to provoke gestures of impatience which make is said by Said in these texts. I go back to the formulation, "How is it plain that something is going on. This signifies something about the logocentrism in or a governing instance of both the writer the structure of logocentrism itself. Logocentrism is not a homogeneous Western metaphysics that would control the writer... ?" Now, in this milieu in relation to which one is either inside or outside. sentence he transforms logocentrism into a kind of behest [instance], Logocentrism is an impulse [un mouvement]-let's call it that--an that is to say into a program which supposedly comes along to give impulse towards self-centering or recentering things on the basis of orders to a writing subject. .. a demand [une instance] named, among other names, Logos. And by definition that impulse fails-at least it doesn't reach the point it J. CREECH: I should point out that in this part of my question I was would like to reach. And thus, from the outset, at the same time as summarizing Said... this impulse inscribes its efficacity, it inscribes the signs of its failures, and leaves traces of its interior limits. And it's in the J. DERRIDAI Ah, you're summarizing. Yes that's true. There aren't traces of these limits that a deconstruction of logocentrism labors. any quotation marks there... And if today it takes a certain form-it had to take other forms not long ago-if today it is taking the form of a quasi-systematic J. CREECH: There aren't any quotation marks there, right. I believe deconstruction of logocentrism, it's not because a "writern or a I'm summarizing faithfully, but all the same... "writing subjectn or an individual can @stepout of it' and then recount what happens. Itfa because in all these structures (and they J. DERRIDA: But I think that he also speaks of 8Writbg subjd... are not only philosophical structures, they are cultural, economic, I would still say that Iogocentrism does not act from the outdde in military, scientific, technical, etc.) in all these structures the order to constrain both a subject and the ensemble of Western logocentrist or logocentric impulse is rocked by historical events, metaphysics. For example, the notion of @writer,*and the notion of rocked by things that happen. That happen not just in the university. subject,& a logocentric product. So, one can't say that logocentrism That happen in the world, in dimensions that are political, social, commands the subject. The subject is a logocentric concept. That military, techno-scientific, etc. And it is because of this jolt that doesn't mean that we can get rid of it just like that. It's not a there are here and there individuals, institutional sites, through question of getting rid of it, moreover. But we're not dealing with a which this jolt is taking a discursive form, that is to say terms, machine giving orders from the outside, to a free individual who all of texts, discourses, courses. a sudden is supposed to find him or herself captive of logocentrism. In any case that's not how I am trying to describe things. J. CREECH: But in your statement just then, isn't there at least the And that leads to the question which is supposed to concern me: suggestion of a difference between logocentrism on the one hand and "...How can a writer, such as yourself, be outside logocentricism to on the other hand, the historical forces which are supposedly making that marginal extent required to & to it?" Yes, well, I've tried to it possible for deconstruction to take the form it is taking? And suggest' repeatedly that there is no simple exteriority possible as which are making it possible for these limits that are marked in texts regards logocentrism, no more for me than for anyone else. to take the form that they are taking now, to be published (so to speak) in the way they are currently? 18 JACQUES DERRIDA 1 JACQUES DERRIDA 19 J. DERRIDA: Yes, but these historical forces you're alltiding to can't 1 be defined as "historical forces" except within logocentrism. To deconstructionist politics is not really possible. If texts are always name them 'historical forces" is to name them in the grammar and in 1 open, then "the differences between one class interest and another, the syntax of logocentrism. There are things that happen before they between oppressor and oppressed . . .one ideology and another, are can be named, before we can choose names for them, because all virtual-but never crucial. . .-in the finally reconciling element of names are marked by logocentrism. Before choosing these names one textuality" (p. 214). How do you respond to this and to the other must take cognizance that things are happening. Grave things are criticisms of your work which situate themselves in the historico- happening. For example--I don't know-the *-limitation of Western political sphere in order to accuse the absence of such concerns in authority relative to the third world, the premises of nuclear war, most of your published writings? etc. Other events which are general indices Hke that... So, things happen and because of them logocentrism no longer enjoys the placid J. DERRIDA; Very rapidly. This is a question of the same type as self-assurance that it used to have, and it is in this anxiety that the one about ["agency" and] the outside of the text. [Cf. p. 14, deconstruction inscribes itself. above.] But deconstruction is also a symptom. It's a symptom that takes a philosophical form most often. Philosophical and literary. J. CREECH: Exactly. Which is to say, it occupies little comers in the world historical supermarket [petits lieux de la grande surface historique-juste- J. DERRIDA: To say for example, ndeconstruction suspends ref- ment-mondiale]. What we call deconstruction is... How shall I say? erence," that deconstruction is a way of enclosing oneself in the sign, Imagine a great earthquake throughout California. And then in a in the nsignifier,. is an enormous naivete stated in that form. You university somebody sees a crack appear. Well, deconstruction- see, from the very beginning my deconstructive propositions began by deconstruction under that name, and in the form of the discourses calling signification, the pair ~i~nifierlsignlfied,into question. So, to we've been referring to in the last few minutes-is the Western, say that deconstruction consists in giving the signifier such a literary, philosophical academic form for the essential part of this predominant place that the referent gets tossed out is already an great human earthquake which is rocking all the structures of unacceptable formulation. So to start with, let's say that that's not humanity. The logical, economic, social structures, etc. the way things should be described. That brings us around to your question of reference. I don't Not only is there reference for a text, but never was it know if we have time to... proposed that we erase effects of reference or of referents. Merely that we re-think these effects of reference, I would indeed say that J. CREECH: I would certainly like to get to it. Edward Said's the referent is textual. The referent is in the text. Yet that does critique repeats the now-standard lament that ndeconstruction" as not exempt us from having to describe very rigorously the necessity practiced by you neglects the historical and the political "hors texte." of those referents. And personally speaking, never have I said that Whereas for Foucault, "a signifier occupying a place, signifying in a there is no referent. I realize that people often claim that, that it's place, is-rather than represents-an act of will with ascertainable frequently been understood in that way. But never have I said that political and intellectual consequences . . ." (p. 220). You, according there is no referent. to Said, want to disconnect the signifier from a determinable obligation to a signified such as "willv and "political conseq~ences.~ J. CREECH: But I know that there will be people who will read these For. Said, however, texts have a racinating function relative to the lines, and who will read "the referent is textual," and who will then social and political "hors texte" which Foucault tries to force into read that "we have to think the necessity of the referent,"but will legibility. He "makes a text assumen its relation to power (p. 212). think that everything still remains in the signifier, in the text. whereas Said finds in your work an insistence on suspending such links.' He uses terms like "dedefinitionNand "anti-refcrentialityn to J. DERRIDA: Of coursel Because first, they translate "text" by characterize the thrust of your texts. It is thereby implied that a "signifier," which is illegitimate. It's really very important to point that out. And next, they translate "text" by "book." So of course! 20 JACQUES DERRIDA J I JACQUES DERRIDA 21 But if we begin saying the text is not signifier [le texte n'est pas signifiant], the text is not a tissue of signs (signifier~lsignifieds)~ and secondly, the text can't be reduced to discourse found in books, ' P. KAMUF; Yes. So now another strategy is required, right? but rather everything is text, and therefore an atomic bomb is a text, then making such claims at least is not the same thing as suspending J. DERRIDA: Yes. the referent. This question of reference--which you're right is indeed crucial-at least to my mind should lead us to reelaborate a P. KAMUF: Because you did use the past tense: "lt was usefyl to transformation of the concept of writing, of trace, of text. I have say that." the feeling-again speaking hastily in straightforward terms of immediate feelings-I have the feeling that what I am doing is more J. DERRIDA: Yes. referential than most discourses that I call into question. The impossibility of reducing reference, that's what I am trying to say- P. KAMUF: And now, it's no longer useful to say it? and of reducing the other. What I'm doing is thinking about difference along with thinking about the other. And the other is the J. DERRIDA: Yes it is. I think that it's going to be useful for a hard core of reference. It's exactly what we can't reinsert into rather long time. interiority, into the homogeneity of some protected place. So thinking about difference is thinking about "ference." And the [GENERAL LAUGHTER] irreducibility of "ferencen is the other. )It's what is other, which is different. In all strategy you try to choose the best, the best strategy, the technique or the levers which can be the most economical, in J. CREECH: The irreducibility of what, did you call it? other words, that can serve the best and the longest time possible. I think that this text business-at least I believe so, I may be wrong, J, DERRIDA: "Feren~e.~Reference. Of "that which carries." but this is the way it appears to me--is of a nature to remain useful and necessary for a very long time. But that doesn't mean that it's J. CREECH: Ah, I see. the only one. I also began, in a manner of speaking, by saying that there were no master words, no master gestures, that there was only a chain where concepts should relay each other. I am persuaded that J. DERRIDA: Yes, a referent is what "carries back to.# Referent, means "referring to the other." And I think that the ultimate at one moment or another there will be better words, better names referent is the other. And the other is precisely what can never than "texten "differencen or ndeconstruction.w It can allow itself to be closed in again within any closure whatsoever. So depend on the situation. That doesn't mean that these words that's what I'm trying to say. It is just as paradoxical for me to see immediately fall out of usage, but only that along the way, to the this thought translated as a thought without reference, as it is to see degree they aren't ntrue,n other words will take their place. textual thought translated as thought about language. Language I believe in spite of everything that the strategy for the last games. It's just as topsyturvy in the one case as in the other. ten, fifteen years-my small strategy--has in fact shifted. That's not to say that now I'm going to put deconstruction in the drawer and P. KAMUF: It seems to me, then, that you are forced to adopt another take up something else. It means that there are gestures, move- strategy. A moment ago you said that at a certain moment it seemed ments, procedures, words which become less urgent, less useful--or "strategically useful" to say something like, "text is all there is." less overwhelmingly useful-than others, and then at that moment But that phrase, as you just pointed out, was twisted by the there is a pass off in the relay. reception which mistook it. There is no single strategy. Since a strategy is dictated by places really, and therefore by forces and individuals who are J. DERRIDA: The logocentric reception, because... inscribed in these places, what may be strategically opportune here at one moment, is no longer opportune there at another moment. For 22 JACQUES DERRIDA myself, I write from the place-several places-in which I find myself. JACQUES DERRIDA 23 I think that my strategy, if you can call it that, at least in the sixties and seventies, was largely determined by the French scene, by what ndeconstruction" itself has a whole genealogy. It's an old French was happening on the French theoretical scene, what with struc- word whfch had fallen out of use, that I used for the first time, so to turalism, Lacanianism and certain other elements. The reference to speak, in this particular sense. But I did so with the sense that I the linguistic model, the Saussurian model, was dominant at that time. was translating and deforming a word of Freud's and a word of So it was because of that particular program that I was led to insist Heidegger's. In Heidegger the word is Qbbau," as well as *Destruk- on writing, on text. But once that situation is no longer dominant, tion". But deconstruction is neither Heidegger's Abbau nor Destruk- other gestures are possible. And in the United States it's different. tion, although it is related, naturally. So already the Virst usen of And different in other ways for other people. There is no single the word deconstruction was a sort of deforming translation in which strategy. the schema of an original requiring a supplement and so forth, was made to point back towards Abbau and Destruktion. All this is in JANE TODD: In some recent texts, notably "Des Tours de Babel," [in fact very complicated. But let's assume the hypothesis, at least for Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph Graham, Cornell University convenience sake, that the original formulation of deconstruction Press, 1984T you have written that translation is a necessary comes from Europe. supplement to the original and even in the original, a demand that is In that case, I think that in fact you're right-in any case that's already part of the original, but in the manner of work that remains my experience. What happens in the United States becomes absolutely to be done, a task of the translator. It's what survives, continues to vital. It is a translation supplement that is absolutely called for by live, but also what grants an augmented life. You have suggested too something which must have been lacking in the original. With the that deconstruction is not "made in Prance," but that it is an effect of strangeness, of displacement-sometimes recognizable, American invention. I think there's a certain relation between these sometimes unrecognizable-which that produces. And personally two concepts. In both cases the original finds the supplement speaking, when I'm in the United States I frequently have the sense of necessary for its originality in a mode of linguistic or cultural recognizing things and of not recognizing things. There's the issue of alterity. Now, you suggest that in America we are the most language in the strict sense. That is, when I read deconstruction in receptive to and most reactionary against deconstruction. To what English, it's somethfng else. It's altogether something else, it's true. extent does the conservative reaction to your work have a necessary And at the same time, I feel that I'm incapable of explaining the and essential relation to the original? In other words, do such American transformatlons of deconstruction through and through. critics as Denis Donoghue, Jackson Bate, Ren6 Wellek, John Searle, That's in part because I lack familiarity with all the traditions we and even the article in Newsweek assure the "survival" of your were speaking about a moment ago, I know "New Criticism" not at work? all--or very poorly, very indirectly. Anglo-Saxon literature, which is after all the vehicle for deconstructive movements in English J. DERRIDA: Thank you. In the first part of your question, departments, I know poorly. (And it's in English departments that although the notion of translation and supplement are invoked to things are happening more than in departments of French or complicate everything, nevertheless you are supposing that the philosophy.) So when I see texts appearing which deal with Words- original of deconstruction is not to be found in America. I don't know worth or Wallace Stevens, etc., these are absolutely new things for how true that is. I don't know if there is an original of me, things I'm sure not to understand well. In this empirical and deconstruction. Naturally, to answer your question seriously we phenomenal sense then, I indeed have the feeling you describe there would have to take up that whole schema of Benjamin's, and when you speak of a "mode of linguistic or cultural alterity." everything I was trying to interpret from it too. And yet, I wouldn't translate it into terms of "survival.* We But nevertheless, let's suppose as a hypothesis that something really have to specify the word "survivaln very carefully. As you of deconstruction originally took place in Europe. The fact is that it know,, in Benjamin's text ["The Task of the Translator: An Intro- began to be named in Europe. That's incontestable. The word duction to the Translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parislens" in Illuminations, Ed. with introduction by Hannah Arendt (Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 69-82], in what I say about it, it's not a question of a 24 * JACQUES DERRIDA name surviving into posterityalthough that's not without its ? JACQUES DERRIDA importance. Rather, it's a question of a very strange structure whereby the dimension of 2 survivance--the fact of surviving, that which survives-constructs the very present of the text and makes it 4 IGENERAL LAUGHTER] into something which neither happens nor fails to happen. It constructs the present of the text as something belonging to a ...the thought that my work has to survive all that gives me very language that calls for a translation which it renders impossible. mixed feelings, I must say. In other words, it is a poetic or sacred event. In Benjamin's text, it is obvious that the moment when a text no longer allows J. TODD: But that's why I added the part about work remaining to be translation in the conventional sense of the term-that is, the done. That is, translation is after all a task. separation between the meaning and the letter somehow-that moment is a poetic moment, both the poetic and the sacred moment of the text. J. DERRIDA: Of course. So I would say that if there is a llnoble" It's the religious moment that one finds in all texts, even if they task of translation, I wouldn't entrust it to the people you named. aren't religious texts. And in our relation to literature, that moment exists. Our relation to literature is a sacred, sacralizing moment, at [GENERAL LAUGHTER] least by virtue of the fact that a literary text is a text in which the distinction between the signifier and the signified, let's say to be But the idea that, even so, they might be working for "the survival of brief, or between form and content, is impossible. The event consists my work1' is a thought that doesn't displease me. in that. This impossibility longs for translation, cries after trans- lation, demanding a translation which is for that reason impossible. [GENERAL LAUGHTER] Our relation to this body where the letter and meaning are not distinguished-that is, our relation to literature-is a relation to a But since I believe neither in the translating power nor the survival sacralized text. Benjamin describes the very movement of sacral- of my work the question doesn't arise. ization. When the relation to the text is a relation to an event that What goes on in the translations of texts in which I myself have cannot be translated, and in which the meaning is no longer separated been engaged, now that's something that does interest me, that's what from the letter, then we have a relation to the religious, or let's say I do care about, what goes to the very quick of my desire. And when we have a sacralizing relation. these translations produce this augmentation, these new textual The survivance of such a moment is then the appeal that goes bodies, then I think that nothing better could happen to me. At that out, which is heard in this original text in relation to a translation-in point it's not a matter of survival in the sense of posterity, but of relation to another event in another language-which will augment another type of =ival, of "more living." You know, in the text you language. It will not be content merely to transport a content into refer to, and also in "Living On," I talk a lot about survival. Survival another language, nor just to communicate or to transmit something, isn't simply life after death, but a strange dimension of "plus de vien- but will produce between the two languages this experience that both "more lifeu and "no more life." Or "plus que vie," that's it, "more Benjamin calls "reine Sprache," pure language. At that moment we than life." Plus de vie and plus que vie. And, yes, sometimes I think experience what language is, what language really is. And this that it happens that way in certain texts, in certain translations. Not augmentation, that's what survival is. La survivance is, so to speak, "translation" in the strict linguistic sense of the term, where you at work in this augmentation-and there is a whole series of take a text and then you publish a translation of it, but rather when metaphors for it in Benjamin. through all sorts of other texts--not referring at all to my own-such Now, you bluntly ask me the question [LAUGHTER] of the a translation is produced. There is more. There is more; there is survival of my work in relation to... I mean, when .In the same something else. But in this "something else1' there is all the same a sentence you have Donoghue, Jackson Bate, Wellek, John Searle (to , kind of history. Really, I think that that's the best thing that which several others should be added). .. happens to me in America, when it happens. Or that's what I've been coming here to look for, but... So. Have I begun to answer your 26 JACQUES DERRIDA JACQUES DERRIDA 27

3. TODD: The question is also, when you say that we are the University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 1781. Would you like to receptive and the most reactionary frkactifs], can that reaction respond to this view of deconstruction's institutional role in America, an affirmative force? especially as it concerns a certain practice or non-practice of politics? J. DERRIDA: Yes, absolutely. Well, "affirmativen... I don't kno "Positive," in any case. I am persuaded-and I say this witho J. DERRIDA: Well, as far as Jonathan Arac's statement is concerned, cynicism, because I think that's the way it happens all the time-I let's say that 1 don't believe just becauseand it's trueJthe Yale really persuaded that the people you named are doing very good wor critics are attacked both by those who wish to preserve...' etc., that for deconstruction. I could say a lot against them, and I think it follows that deconstruction occupies 'the middle grount' Being would be justified. But I believe that the damage they produce attacked by both sides doesn't signify that one is in the middle. . ambiguous, and that they are helpless to prevent this ambiguity. It That's all I would say. Perhaps it's because one is beyond. But not is in nobody's power to change that. I mean, we have enough history in the middle. If one were in the middle one would be loved by both behind us to know how things happen ln cultul-e. At a given moment, sides. when some motif is in the process of becoming dominant, all the attacks against it only manage to feed the opposing force. That's the [GENERAL LAUGHTER] way it goes until the moment it all turns back around. But there is always a phase during which dedicated hostility has an inverse effect, P. KAMUFt Recently you began an inquiry into the notion of invention in an absolutely mechanical way. That's the way it has to be. I in a series of lectures which is called "Psyche: The Invention of the think, I hope that it's happening that way, and that reactionism [la Othern [forthcoming]. This series begins in effect with a question rkactivitk] is part of the establishing of deconstruction. that you seer? to be asking yourself, and I'm quoting you only from Obviously the threat is more in the establishing than in the memory. (What's more, I heard you in English, so... ) What am I hostility. It's clear that if it worked too well it wouldn't work at all. going to be able to invent this time?" you asked. Although this Letts just say that's a question for the future. question seems to take the form of a self-interrogation, it is But there comes a moment when people rush in, Obviously pronounced vis-a-vis a listening place (une 6couteI which, one can be there are always individuals at such a moment, in such a social scene, sure, is itself asking more or less the same thing. "what is is Derrida who have an infallible flair for playing that role--how to call it?-the going to invent for us-in front of us-this time?" Is this other role of paradoxical 'scapegoats.' They try to designate the scape- question also the question of the other? And here I'm asking several goat, but all the while they are doing the work of buffoons who come questions at once: Is the American listening place-to use short- along and say a certain truth that they aren't aware of saying. I hand--differentiated enough to reinvent another deconstruction with believe that a lot of truth is speaking through the discourses of you? And since this last question can't be addressed to you, Danto, Searle, Bate, Wellek and several others. It's not the truth precisely, without getting tangled up in effects of, mirroring, that they say it is, but I think that one can read a lot of truth about shouldn't the question be displaced towards a questioning of the deconstruction in their discourses. mirror in all its effects? You then led us through Francis Ponge8s poem "Fable," to these J. TODD: Jonathan Arac writes that the "Yale Criticsw"are attacked final lines, an allegory of the fable's moral: "APRES sept ans de both by those who wish to preserve the institutions of literary study malheurl Elle brisa son miroir [AFTER seven years of misfortune/ unchanged and by those who want change but deny that the Yale She broke her mirror]." Assuming that it's not a matter of Critics are producing any,'' and therefore that deconstruction indifference that Ponge days "shen here, what relation could one see occupies "the middle ground between the 'literarilv conservative' and between your reading of this invention of Ponge, which is a breaking the 'politically radicalt"[The Yale Critics: Deconstruction& America, of the mirror, and what I would call "the deconstruction of feminism eds. Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, Wallace Martin (Minneapolis: in America," putting this phrase too in quotation marks? I'm sure you're aware that several of the most categorical gestures of 2 8 JACQUES DERRIDA JACQUES DERRIDA 2 9 exclusion towards deconstruction are now taking shape around the same. And, at least for me, there can be no re-invention of word "feminism" in this country. In particular, it's getting to be a deconstruction unless it remains very foreign to me, or at least watchword that in your writings the feminine can only be read as a something I could neither anticipate nor recognize. This does metaphor, and that you still don't deal with Woman [la femme]. But happen. Speaking anecdotally, it frequently happens that I see under does one really hear what you say when one reads in that way? the heading "deconstruction," in the guise of deconstruction, things Doesn't breaking the mirror also break the word "de" in a phrase that are absolutely new and foreign to me and that I never imagined it such as "parler, bcrire de la femme (speak, write oflfrom woman]?ll possible to associate with deconstruction. And finally, to what extent must the invention of the other give up And now finally, since we unfortunately have to go too fast. I talking about woman in order to hold on to the chance of speaking get to Ponge's "Fable" and what you have quoted from it here. --from the place of woman Idepuis la femme]? Specifically, that in the "fable's moral," the responsibility or the initiative for breaking the mirror is entrusted to a feminine pronoun. J. DERRIDA: Thank you. There's a lot there, I'm going to try to In the lecture that you refer to I multiplied the approaches to reread things in order. this feminine. We would have to reconstitute the reading of the The first sentence of the lecture you mentioned isn't said just whole poem to do that. I can't do it here. But among all the possible ironically, rather it is offered as an example of rhetoric which is hypotheses there is this one: that 'lshel' refers to the fable itself, to immediately afterward analyzed in terms of the history of rhetoric- the event of the fable, to the fabulous. That I1she" refers to truth. Cicero, etc. This first sentence is a game which jmplicitly and And we know that indeed very often truth has been presented as a potentially contains not only the discourse that follows on the subject woman. Saying that %hen is truth which breaks the mirror isn't of rhetoric, [but also] everything that follows on the subject of necessarily any different from saying in traditional rhetorical terms invention. So this first question didn't propose that I was going to that woman breaks the mirror. invent something. It was a sort of matrix for everything that I was In another direction, one could also demonstrate that the poem going to try and say later about invention. distributed all the personal pronouns. There is "je," "tu," "vous," One of the themes of this lecture was that a deconstruction of "nous," and then nelle@at the end. One could also show that this the concept of invention suggests that invention (if there is such a moral appears to invert the French proverb (an EngIish proverb, too, I thing) is invention of the impossible, of the other-beyond everything believe) according to which breaking a mirror brings seven years' bad that's been said about it in the history of philosophy which I try to luck, and that the mirror is broken at the end of the poem's seven analyze in the lecture. An invention of what is possible is not an lines. So the misfortune is in the mirror and not in the breaking of invention. Invention of the impossible as invention of the other-a the mirror. @Shen puts an end to the misfortune of specularity in syntagmatic element [syntagme] in which "of the othern is a double some way. genitive, leaving invention at the disposition of the other. It's the "Shen is a feminine pronoun. I do not say that it's woman. The other who invents. And basically it's the other who invents me. It's difficulty of your questions, of what follows from them, is in the the other who invents us. To the degree that we invent the words "feminismn and "woman." There is no doubt that "she" refers impossible, we invent the other. to what is called the feminine. But what have we said in saying that? I don't know if we can get to the question of America again. We I said in the lecture that the "she" could be Ponge as well, that were saying a while back, if you like, that basically since developments occur in his poems (there are other examples) in which deconstruction in America wasn't simply a displacement, a trans- the signer of the poem ends up being on the feminine side. Or it can mission, a translation of a European deconstruction, what goes on in be a man. ItShe" can be a man. It can be the feminine of a man [le America with deconstruction is not only diverse but other. It is fbminin d'un homme]. As you know, these things are possible. That something in relation to which I am not slmply an outsider--since now complicates a great deal the questions of woman and feminism. my ties with America are numerous enough that I'm somewhat Under the heading of this unmasterable complication, I come to implicated in all that goes on here--nor, simply totally .at home.' what you call "the deconstruction of feminism in America." Con- because what happens in America remains very foreign to me all the tinuing to proceed by summary and crude statements, I would say JACQUES DERRIDA 31

that if one reads a bit attentively one should realize that what I was attempting certainly was not feminism, and certainly not phalla- that for me deconstruction is certainly not feminist. At least as I centric. I'm not saying that everything I write, or everything I am, have tried to practice it, I believe it naturally supposes a radical or everything I do is exempt from all phallocentrism. I wouldn't go deconstruction of phallogoceritrism, and certainly anabsolutely other that far because I believe that it's impossible, for men as well as for and new interest in women's questions. But if there is one thing that women. So let's just say that the- most insistent and the most it must not come to, it's feminism. So I would say that decon- organized motif in my texts is neither feminist nor phallocentric. And struction is a deconstruction of feminism, from the start, insofar as that at a certain point I try to show that the two are tantamount,to feminism is a form-no doubt a necessary form at a certain moment- the same thing. but a form of phallogocentrism among many others. Now, when you say that "it's getting to be a watch word that in So, c I think that for example Spurs, which is often mentioned in your writings the feminine can only be read as a metaphor." then J this kind of discussion, is a text which, following a certain Nietzsche, would say "no"-again to go very quickly. It's not a metaphor. It's a certain moment in Nietzschean discourse, is an anti-feminist as well not a metaphor first off because in order for the feminine to be a as anti-phallogocentric text-since precisely the symmetry of those metaphor one would have to be assured of knowing what the essence two things is its central motif. (When I say "anti-feminist,%aturally propre of woman is. And what I try to say particularly in Spurs is I'm simplifying a lot, I'm speaking very crudely... ) So for me decon- that woman has no essence of her very own, and that that's the struction is a certain thinking of women [pensde des femmes] which phallocentric gesture. It's the gesture of considering that there is does not however want to immobilize itself in feminism. femme" and that she has her very own essence. So if there's not I believe feminism is necessary. ,Feminism has been necessary an essence proper to woman, neither is there a metaphor. The word and is still necessary in certain situations. But at a given moment, 'Iw~man,~designates neither the essence proper to woman nor the to close oneself in feminism is to reproduce the very thing one is essence of metaphor. It's another order. And moreover, I never struggling against. And here too there are gestures that are speak about woman-I mean, assuming that discourse as my own. necessary, staggered, that have to be practiced at the same time or When I say "la femme," I'm quoting someone else. successively... I don't know. In the last part of your question, you say, "to what extent So I think that because of the complexity of this question, of should the invention of the other give up talking about woman in this strategy, certain feminists-certain women struggling in the order to hold on to the chance of speaking from the place of woman name of feminism-may see in deconstruction only what will not allow [depuis la femme]?" Yes of course, that alternative is inscribed in a itself to be feminist. That's wily they try to constitute a sort of target, a silhouette, a shooting gallery almost, where they spot position between a discourse which would make woman an object and phallocentrism and beat up on it [tappe dessus]. Just as Said and a discourse of which woman would be the subject, the initiating others constitute an enemy in the image [LAUGHTER] of that against subject. "...From the place of woman.'' which they have ready arms, in the same way, I think certain feminists, as they begin to read certain texts, focus on particular P. KAMUF: Not necessarily. I was thinking also of the notion of "listening place [Bcoute]." It would be, it seems to me, more themes out of haste and say, "Well, there you have it..." (I don't know exactly who one could think of in this regard, but I know that it goes differentiated than that. Not only the position of the subject, but the on.) In France I recall a very violent reaction from a feminist who subject would be understood as an effect of the listening to the upon reading Spurs and seeing the multiplication of phallic images- other, would be created by a kind of listening. There would no longer spurs, umbrellas, etc.--said, "So, it's a phallocentric text," and be any master. started kicking up a violent fuss, charging about like a bull place perhaps ... J. DERRIDAI Right. Talking from the listening of the woman. P. KAMUF: That's it. It's one of the alternatives. [GENERAL LAUGHTER] I

So I think that it's a matter of patience, of reading. I think I JACQUES DERRIDA 33

NOTE 32 JACQUES DERRIDA IFor example, Thomas J.J. Altizer, et al., Deconstruction @ J. DERRIDA: Yes. In other words if we consider for example what Theology (New York, 1982); Mark Taylor, ed., ~econstructin~The- is called a writing man-for example me, to the extent that I'm ology, special issue of Semeia (1983). supposed to be a man-then writing on woman should be less writing on woman than writing from or on the basis of [depuis] what comes to me from a feminine place. Yes, I agree...

P. KAMUF: Well, that's what I've learned from reading you. MNEMWNE [GENERAL LAUGHTER] Zweite Faesung

J. DERRIDA: And what I too have learned from the'bcoute of women, Friedrich Hiilderlin from listening to the degree I can to a certain feminine voice. Only, that's the reason I always take the rather heavy-handed Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos precaution of saying "so-called..." Because it's not such a simple Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast thing when we say that whoever bears a masculine proper name, is Die Sprache in der Fremde verloren. 'anatomically male, etc., is a man. This feminine voice can pass Wenn nlmlich Uber Menschen through trajectories that are extremely multiple and altogether 5 Ein Streit iet an dem Himmel und gewaltig interior. Well, "nteriortl... Not really ninterior.n And it's recip- Die Monde gehn, so redet rocal, since the same thing is going on on both sides of what can be Das Meer auch und StrBme milssen thought of as a mirror, In other words, on the women's side, and Den Pfad sich suchen. Zweifellos even in the most feminist women, the masculine voice is not silent. 1st aber Einer. Der [LAUGHTER] Both outside and inside. One is, dealing here with a 10 Kann tiiglich es Indern. Kaum bedarf er most complicated specular machtne where the mirror is in some ways Gesetz. Und es t5net das Blatt und EichMume wehn dann never broken and yet always broken. Where the breaking of the neben mirror in fact is a moment in the reconstitution of another mirror. Den Firnen. Denn nicht vermijgen What I tried to establish in this little poem by Ponge--where in a Die Himmfischen alles. NSmlich es reichen certain way it happens-is this complication of the mirror structure, Die Sterblichen eh'an den Abgrund. Also wendet es sich, das with all its grammatical, poetic, sexual dimensions. Echo 15 Mit diesen. Lang ist J. CREECH, P. KAMUF, J. TODD: Thank you very much. 1 Die Zeit, es ereignet sich aber I Das Wahre. J. DERRIDA: Thank you for all the questions.

Translated by James Creech Miami University RESPONSE TO JACQUES DERRIDA'S Friedrich Hiilderlin .MNEMOSYNE: A LECTURE FOR PAUL DE MANe

Wie aber Liebes? Sonnenschein ANDREW PARKER Am Boden sehen wir und trockenen Staub 20 Und tief mit Schatten die Wllder und es blilhet An Dlchern der Rauch, bei alter Krone "I remember him (I have no right to utter this sacred verb, only Per TUrme, friedsam; und es girren one man on earth had that right and he is dead) with a dark Verloren in der Luft die Lerchen und unter dem Tage weiden passion flower in his hand, seeing it as no one has ever seen Wohlangefilhrt die Schafe des Himmels. it. Und . . " 25 Schnee, wie Maienblumen -Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes el memorioso" Das Edelmiitige, wo Es seie, bedeutend, gllnzet mit I'd like to begin my comments on "Mnemosyne" by addressing Der griinen Wiese briefly the relationship between Derridals lecture and the poem by Der Alpen, hHlftig, da ging Htilderlin he cited in part. This relationship, I'd argue, is certainly 30 Vom Kreuze redend, das not a simple one, for it forcibly raises questions concerning our Gesetzt ist unterwegs einmal ability to differentiate between Vexts that cite" and "texts that are Gestorbenen, auf der schroffen Strass citedft--to delimit, in other words, the borders between container and Ein Wandersmann mit contained. This kind of clear-cut distinction cannot be sustained in Dem andern, aber was ist dies? , the case at hand, for the container and the contained are both called by the very same name: 81Mnemosyne." Whereas Fregels familiar Am Felgenbaum ist mein distinction between sense and reference ISh und Bedeutung] was Achilles mir gestorben, designed to explain why it is possible that a single object can be called Und Ajax liegt by different names, what we are confronted with is a problem of an An den Grotten, nahe der See, altogether different order, one that resists solution in Fregean An Blchen, benachbart dem Skamandros. terms. For "Mnemosynen apparently presents us with a single word Vom Genius k& ist bei Windessausen, nach designating two different objects, a proper name unpxoperly denoting Der heimatlichen Salamis siisser two different referents. I stress apparently, however, since it is not Gewohnheit, in der Fred* at all clear that the two objects in question are, in fact, rigorously Ajax gestorben distinguishable as dfscrete entities. The problem here is not solely Patroklos aber in des Kijniges Harnisch. Und es starben that two seemingly separate things are called by the same name, but Noch andere viel. Mit eigener Hand that one of these things is situated inside the other as welt. In citing Vie1 traurige, wilden Muts, doch g6ttlich "MnernosyneH within a text called "Mnemosyne," Derridals lecture Gezwungen, zuletzt, die anderen aber undermines a traditional understanding of the relationship between Im Geschicke stehend, im Feld. Unwillig nlmlich part and whole: if, by virtue of the identity between the two titles, Sind Himmlische, wenn einer nicht die Seele schonend sich the one can always substitute for the other, then the part Zusammengenommen, aber er muss doch; dem ("Mnemosynetl)can be seen as equivalent to the whole ("Mnemosyne"), Gleich fehlet die Trauer. thereby hollowing out the wholeness of the whole, its identity with itself. At the same moment, however, the whole can take its place as Friedrich Hijlderlin I the part for which it substitutes, the container now erupting inside the contained, the envelope itself enveloped by what it formerly

[CRITICAL EXCHANGE #17 (Winter, 1985), pp. 35-44] ANDREW PARKER 37 36 ANDREW PARKER mourning can be attributed either to the poet or to the reader-that seemed to hold. This structure of double invagination (I use here a La what is erroneous is either the poet's act of mourning or our act of term developed by Derrida in a reading of Blanchot's folie du jourl) mourning the poet. Either way, however, de Man reads the verb makes it impossible finally to tell "Mnemosynen from "Mnemosyne," to "fehIenn unequivocally as "to be in errorsn yet an alternative draw stable boundaries between Derrida's text and HBlderlin's. We translation of this verb might be that mourning is lacking, is missing, cannot, in fact, determine any longer where the one leaves off and the is absent. The "lack of mourning" is itself syntactically problematic, other begins: Simultaneously part and whole and neither part nor for the genitive construction can mean both that mourning is not whole. "Mnemosyne" remains irreducibly different from itself, a and proper name which literally is beside itself. present, is elsewhere at the moment, that mourning is incomplete, is less-than-whole. "Dem Gleich feblet die Trauer1$is thus at least "Mnemosyne," in other words, might be said to echo itself within the itself-but this mention of the word llecholtis already a citation from trebly divided, poem's ultimate line refusing to specify whether the HGlderlin poem (from line 14, to be precise). If time allowed, I'd mourning is an error, a gap, or a fragment-refusing, that is, to provide the syntactic closure one might expect at the moment when a offer here a detailed reading of the poem to reinforce this interpretation of its non-self-identity.2 Since my time is short, poem signs off. 1'11 return in a few moments to these last words of the poem, but first I'd like to explore a bit just what it is in the however, I'll skip very rapidly over most of the poem, pausing only long enough to call attention to the thematics of language in the nature of mourning that could lend itself to such an impasse. In opening three lines as it leads three lines later. to the figure of the traditional psychoanalytic terms, mourning normally is a process in path; to the relationship between the abyss, the ground, and the which a subject gradually recovers from the death of a beloved sunshine in lines 14 and 18-19; and, to the rhetoric of flowers links object; this object is interiorized within the subject until the latter's lines 20 and 25 to the title of the poem.* In a less cursory analysis libido can invest once again in another living object. The work of I'd also dwell on the appearance of law in the poem-on the phrases mourning, in this conception, is inherently economic in character, a (roughly) "he scarcely needs law" (1. 9) and "the law is underway"& kind of costaccounting designed to guard against the threat of an 30). It remains for a future reading to show how all of these features absolute expenditure of libido with no return on investment. In the prevent the poem from achieving an integral identity, from cohering words of the psychoanalyst Daniel Lagache, mourning therefore as a delimited object. From the present however, I'd simply like to works to "kill deathe-to foreclose this possibility of irreversible concentrate on the last line of the poem, for it presents us with a loss by transforming death's otherness into an economy of sameness.4 highly unstable border, a kind of closure-without-closure: %ern How, then, might we mourn the dead if to mourn them is Gleich fehlet die Trauer." This phrase is exceedingly difficult, ultimately to appropriate them, to violate their difference from us, to perhaps impossible, to translate (let alone make sense of). In the reduce the interval of their alterity? This is the dilemma of YAmitib first place, the grammatical subject of mourning is not identified when Maurice Blanchot is faced with the death of his friend Georges explicitly but requires specification by an act of interpretation. The Bataille. (I thank Jane Gallop for recalling to me both this work by second problemane which is far more difficult in its indifference to Blanchot and her own superb analysis of it.) If, according to . the very possibility of critical choice--is the syntactical uncertainty Blanchot, "death has the false virtue of appearing to bring back to centering on the very fehlen, an uncertainty which permits several intimacy those who were divided by grave differences," then one alternative readings that are not necessarily compatible with one can be faithful to the dead only by speaking to them and not of them; another. One such reading was suggested by Paul de Man in an essay by refusing to make of them simply "the theme of conversations (or dating from 1966 called "Wordsworth und HBlderlinl': "The mourning articles);"5 by respecting "that exteriority which is the very heart, (of the poet) is in error,It3 a rendering which stresses that the act of the innermost, of any intimacy;I16 by challenging, in other words, the apparent self-identity of mourning's economy. Perhaps another vme *A bookseller friend from Amherst recalls seeing a photograph (in for such an acknowledgment of exteriority within the interior is what some Field Guide to Flora) of a wildflower called mnemosyne that Derrida has termed demi-deuil or deuil impossible: blooms only in April. ?his connection between flowers and memory also awaits further exploration. To do one's mourning . . . is an experience of fidelity, but it is ANDREW PARKER ANDREW PARKER characteristic Derridean interest in syntactical undecidability.9 also the opposite. Thus the impossibility of doing one's mourn- If I seem to be pushing matters into a realm of untenable ing, and even the freedom of not doing one's mourning, is also a conjecture, I nevertheless think that my argument is licensed by the form of fidelity. If to do one's mourning and not to do one's poem in question. Drawing on the whole of Hiilderlin's corpus in a mourning are two forms of fidelity and two forms of infidelity, scrupulous reading of the poem's penultimate lines, Paul de Man the only thing that remains-and it is this that I call "half- concluded that the unidentified subject of line 49-einer, 'the oneH- mourning~demhleuill-is an experience between the two.7 "can be none other than ~ousseau."lO If I find the appearance of Rousseau here to be highly significant-if I take his unexpected Mourning as an experience between the two-which Derrida- presence as support for my contention that the differences within also calls nmourning's double constraintn-might describe as well the fehlet might be read as the differences between de Man and Derrida. invaginated structures of the two texts named "Mnem~syne,~might De Man, of course, criticized Derrida's reading of Rousseau in Of account for the ways in which their parts and wholes, exteriors and Grammatology, insisting that Derrida's analysis was "blinded," that interiors, intermingle themselves without limit or reserve. The I1Rousseau escapes from the logocentric fallacy precisely to the irreducible betweenness of this experience of mourning might also extent that his language is literary.ltll De Man, accordingly, con- explain why HBlderlinls poem cannot end on a decisive note, why its sidered himself entitled to confer "exemplary value1' upon Rousseau, alternative renderings of fehlet remain syntactically suspended, why to call "literary, in the full sense of the word, any text [like its bottom border never quite reaches bottom. Finally, and somewhat Rousseau'sl that implicitly or explicitly signifies its own rhetorical less speculatively, we can suggest that this determination of mode . . .a2 For de Man, then, Rousseau remains exemplary insofar mourning as a structure of betweenness informs Derridats strategy as his writing can be deemed nliteraryn-and it is around this question in his remarks on Paul de Man. For Derrida hasn't recounted to us a of the literariness of Rousseau that the debate mentioned this history that would reduce the betweenness of memory to a most morning by Derrida between Rodolphe Gaschd and Suzanne Gearhart unfriendly self-sameness; he has rather affirmed the possibility of has pivoted. absolute loss, redefining friendship in the process as a kind of I agree fully with Derrida that the issues raised in this writing marked by the untotalizable traces of the other within the exchange between Gaschb and Gearhart are far too rich and complex self. Derrida, in other words, writes both of and from the to permit any summary response. If we were to turn, though, to betweenness of mourning (the demi-deuil) in order to speak not of Wlad Godzich's recent defense of de Man vis-A~is Derrida, this Paul de Man but to him, to his memory. In risking thereby a question of reductiveness might be somewhat mitigated, for Godzichls paradoxical infidelity as a measure of fidelity--in unsettling, as a argument hinges to a considerable degree on the effects of a single result, the economism, the mimeticism, of "true mourningn-Derrida word: production.13 apostrophizes to de Man, leaving their differences alone. Godzich focuses in his essay on the section of Of Grammatology These differences between Derrida and de Man thus remain free to called "The Exorbitant. Question of Method," where Derrida describes circulate within the text of t'Mnemosyne.u One place in which to the work of reading as the production of a 'signifying structure."l4 follow the track of such differences is the ending of the poem by This section concludes with the following remarks which Godzich Hiilderlin with which we've been concerned. I'd like to argue here cites in his analysis: that the different possible renderings of fehlet--error on the one hand; absence and/or incompleteness, on the other-can be taken to [Wlhat we call production is necessarily a text, the system of a indicate certain characteristic differences between de Man and writing and of a reading which we know is ordered around its Derrida in their respective understandings of the nature and function own blind spot. We know this a prlori, but only now and with a of the literary. Error, of course, has long served as a key term in knowledge that is not a knowledge at all. de Man's writings, nearly attaining the status of a stylistic trait.8 And while Derrida, to my knowledge, has never offered a thorough Godzich identifies in this passage specific reasons for de Man's analysis of the phrase "dem Cleich fehlet die Trauer," I think it's indifference to Derrida's emphasis vn production-an indifference all legitimate to recognize in its double genitive construction a ANDREW PARKER 41 ANDREW PARKER he would argue, though, that the textual and the "actual world" are he more pronounced, in Godzich's view, by de Man's critical silence on not strictly separable since it is by way of the former's re-marking this issue. Godzich argues that Derrida's characterization of that the latter comes into play as such. If a text, for Derrida, production as "a bringing forth of the other, of the transcendental" g80verrunsall the limits assigned to it so far--all the limits, can lead all too rapidly to "the possibility of a return to the everything that was to be set up in opposition to writing (speech, life, phenomenal" (32-33). If, however, reading were to be redefined the world, the real, history, and what not . . . ),"I8 we might conclude strictly along de Manian lines as an "explicit focusing on the question from this that we cannot return to the phenomenal world since it of knowledge" (33). then any such recourse to the category of never, in fact, has simply been "away." My final quibble is with production, with its attendant risk of phenomenalism, would be Godzich'a treatment of reading as properly an epistemological issue- rendered entirely "unnecessary" (39). In the absence of this purely a treatment which, again, follows de Man in his usual way of framing epistemological approach, the act of reading will slip inevitably into a literature in terms of a certain negative epistemology, e.g.: narrative form which, Godzich concludes, "prmits the contamination Whenever this autonomous potential of language can be revealed by of deconstruction by logocentrisml' (34). De Man, in Godzich's view, analysis, we are dealing with literariness and, in fact, with literature refrains from making this criticism explicitly for to do so would be to as the place where this negative knowledge about the reliability of offer a %ounter-~tory~~itself susceptible to dialectical sublation. linguistic utterance is made available."l9 Derrida's work, I believe, Godzich's essay is argued, of course, with far greater rigor refrains precisely from his kind of epistemological speculation, and subtlety than I can muster here; as Derrida writes in a note to choosing instead to explore the conditions of "a knowledge which is "Mnemosyne," I send you to it as an invomparable work of criticism. not a knowledge at all% knowledge, in my reading of this phrase, I find its analysis, however, open to question in a number of respects. which is defined relationally as non-self-identical (a "knowledge- In the first place, I wonder about the advisability of removing without-knowledge," as Blanchot might say) rather than epis- "production" from the critical vocabulary, for such a deletion would temologically as fully unreliable.20 Whereas de Man's typical em- militate against the possibility of reinscribing the effects of this phasis on "the truth and the falsehood of the knowledge literature word. When Derrida employs terms such as production he is conveys about itself"2f enables him, finally, to equate "the rhetorical, borrowing "an old word from philosophy in order to demarcate it"-to figural potentiality of language with literature itself,a2 Derrida work the word against the accumulated weight of its historical usage maintaine his distance from any such conflation of the rhetorical or rather than to safeguard it against the possibility of "con- the textual with the literary; tamination."l5 If, then, "concepts such as productfan, constitution, and history remain in complicityN with logocentrism, this can be The textual process cannot be dominated by any instance as such, interpreted less as a shortcoming-as a potential for abuse-than as especially not by the theoretical instance in its scientific or an essential element of deconstructive strategy, as an opportunity to philosophical varieties: nor shall I be in too much of a hurry to be welcomed and set to work.16 Secondly, 1 am dubious about call it nfictionalmor "literary."23 Godzich's strictures against the "return of the phenomenalN which Derrida's recourse to production is said to permit-not that I wish to Derrida's restraint seems to be founded on the recognition that recover a naive textual phenomenology but that I understand the logic literature owes its categorical existence to a system of phil- of deconstruction to work against the pertinence of such strictures. osophemes which has already determined the literary as a "placeVn Godzich, I'd argue, is required to hold the phenomenal at a distance which language, for once, can safely be as playful as it likes. insofar as he commits himself to de Man's pervasive tendency t6 Skeptical, in the light of such determinations, of any attempt to distinguish text from world: in "the Rhetoric of Temp~rality,~to cite isolate "a formal specificity of the literary that would have its own a characteristic essay, de Man maintains that "all true irony [states] proper essence and truth,It24 Derrida takes exception to phrases the continued impossibility of reconciling the world of fiction and the such as "literature itself," transforming the onto-epistemological actual world," that irony underwrites "the radical difference that question of "what is Hterature?It into the relational question of separates fiction from the world of empirical realitv."l7 Derrida. to 'Iwhat's between literature?"--a question that highlights not the ANDREW PARKER 43 ANDREW PARKER

(negative) knowledge that literature might impart but its disciplinary suspended in the supplementarity of the verb fehlen-"lulling and self-division: rocking," as Htilderlin wrote in another version of his poem, "on a swinging skiff of the sea."28 What takes place between philosophy and literature, science and literature, politics and literature, theology and literature, Andrew Parker psychoanalysis and literature? It was here . , .that lay the most Amherst College pressing question.2fi

This relational conception implies as well an understanding of NOTES narrative and its limitations that is different from the one proposed by Codzich when he contends that deconstruction courts logocentrism lJacques Derrida, "La hidu genre1The Law of Genre," Glyph, 7 in telling the latter's deceptive llstory.Vor narrative, once more, is (1980). pp. 176-232. less an epistemological problem for Derrida than a relational one: in 21 should take a moment to explain why I haven't reproduced an telling, for example, "strange narratives without events,q6 Derrida English translation of the poem. In the first place, the only published is neither opposing nor rejecting narrative but construing its powers translation available (by Michael Hamburger) is of the third version of otherwise, deploying narrative againat itself rather than refusing it that poem, whereas it is from the significantly-different second altogether as an epistemologically-c~mpromised mode. Like pro- version that Derrida quotes. Secondly, I've omitted a translation for duction, narrative simply cannot be rejected as a theological a strategic teason, in that the poem's putative translatability is remainder, as a metaphysical residue, for "no concept is by itself, and precisely what my analysis will question. consequently in and of itself, meta hysical, outside all the textual 3A translated version of this essay (by Timothy Bahti) will work in which it is inscribed." P7 Acknowledging both the in- appear in de Man's forthcoming The Rhetoric of Romanticism eluctability of narrative and its capacity for self-difference, (Columbia University Press). Derrida's writing instantiates such 'textual work" by reinscribing 4Daniel Iagache,"Le travail du deuil," cited in J. Laplanche and narrative not in its putative falseness but in all of its structural J.-8. Pontalis, The knguage of Pggcboanafysia, trans. Donald Nichol- betweenness. son-Smith (New Yorkr Norton, 1973). p. 486. In underscoring the betweenness of literature and of nap 5Maurice Blanchot, LBAmitib(Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 328- rative, we have returned once more to the very questions with which 29. we began--questions of invagination, of mourning, of syntactical 6Jane Gallop, Intersections (Lincoln: University of Nebraskae undecidability. How are we, then, to settle accounts between Derrida Press, 1981)' p. 40. and de Man, to comprehend the differences that divide them? Can we ?Anne Berger, "Une conversation avec Jacques Derrida," simply label the one the champion of deconstruction, the other its hits, no. 1 (December, 1983). 88-89. most significant resister? If, as Gearhart has argued convincingly, 8See, for example, Stanley Corngold. "Error in Paul de Man," Plilosophy and literature equally fail to subject deconstruction to Critical Inquiry, 8, no. 3 (Spring 1982), 489-507, and de Man's their respective masteries, then what does this failure say about the epistolary reply in the same issue (pp. 509-13. nature of deconstruction "itselft'? Is there such a thing called 9See, for example, Derrida's analysis of the double genitive in deconstruction to which one can be true or from which one can "Title (to be specified),"Sub-Stance, no. 31 (1981), 5-22. deviate--a thing which is not already divided from itself? Does 10~aulde Man, "L'Image de Rousseau dans la pobsie de deconstruction possess a proper name-and, if not, in the name of Htilderlin'l (forthcoming in a translation by Andrzej Warminski in The what can one seek to defend it, be "faithful" to it? How different, Rhetoric of Romauticism). finally, anerrors, gaps, and fragments? Can a rigorous distinction llPaul de Man, Blindness and Insight, 2nd edition (Minneapolis: among such terms be sustained, or are they related to one another in University of Minnesota Press, 1983). p. 138. ways that exceed antithesis? Each of these questions 1'11 leave here lzlbid., p. 136. 44 ANDREW PARKER DECONSTRWSfION IN AMERICA / HEIDEGGER READING H-E- 13~ladGodzich, "The Domestication of Derrida," in The Yale Critics, eds. Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin ANDRZEJ WARMINSKI (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 19831, pp. 20-40. All subsequent references to this essay will be cited directly in the text above. I. Deconstruction in America 14Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakra- vorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), In order not to talk about deconstruction in America-in order p. 158. to learn how not to talk about deconstruction in America--one could 15Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: do worse than to look at an article published in Newsweek (June 22, University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 59. 1981) under the rubric "Ideas" and entitled "A New Look at Lit Crit." 16~ac~uesDerrida, Margins of Pbiloqhy, trans. Alan Bass Because it gathers together and presents in starkly journalistic form (Chica o: University of Chicago Press, 1982). p. 12. the academic gossip that passes for a "discussionn or a Webate" of h3-s~ d Insight, pp. 218, 217. deconstruction and then serves as the primary source for what 18Jacques Derrida, "Living OnlBorder Lines," in Harold Bloom distinguished academics think, say, and write about lldeconstruction,ll et al., Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury, 1979), p. 84. this article has come to play a pivotal role in the drama of 19Paul de Man, "The Resistance to Theory,Vde French NDeconstruction in America," a kind of counter or currency in the Studies, no. 63 (1982), 10. self-generating, balanced, closed economy of exchange that con- 2O~eeStephen Melville, Deconstruction, Criticism, Modernism stitutes talk about deconstruction in America: an economy in which (forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press). This notion of academics tell reporters what deconstruction is and then quote these "relationalityn accords well, I think, with Suzanne Gerhartle under- reporters to tell other academics (and themselves) what it is, in which standing of the irreducible historicity of deconstruction^ see her academics report to and report reporters, in which reporters report "philosophy Before Literature: Deconstruction, Historicity, and the themselves-a self-contained informational relay system of self- Work of Paul de Man," Diacritics, 13, no. 4 (Winter 1983). 63-81. reporting and self-quotation that nowhere has to encounter a ZlBlindness adInsight, p: 164. thought--never mind a reading of texts. A contentless, meaningless, 2ZPaul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale formalistic, nihilistic system if there ever was one-but, like all University Press, 19791, p. 10. systems, terroristically coercive in policing its territory and 23~ac~uesDerrida, La carte postale (Paris: AubierFlam- enforcing its law, whether it be in the form of letters of denunciation marion, 19801, p. 279. to foreign governments, university presidents, or department chalr- 24Podtims, p. 70. men, etc. or in the form of good-natured book-length popularizations 25Jacques Derrida. "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations," in of deconstruction. What does this system have to contain? A good FWosoPry in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore (Cambridge: Cam- way to break its circle would be to read the "ideas" contained in "A bridge University Press, 19831, p. 38. ~ewhk at Lit Crit." 26~eeJacques Derrida, Sign@mgelSgnspmge,, trans. Richard At first sight, it would seem that the Newsweek reporters do Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). pp. 101-02. anything but minimize the terms and the stakes of a struggle they 27Positions, p. 57. characterize as an "all-out war." Although teachers and critics of 28~~thanks to James Creech, Jacques Derrida, Neil Hertz, literature "have always fought like intellectual infantry over the Peggy Kamuf, and Andrzej Warminski for their generous criticisms interpretation of literary texts .. . in recent years the literary scene and comments on an earlier draft of this paper. in the United States has dissolved into a state of all-out war. At

[CRITICAL EXCHANGE #17 (Winter, 1985). pp. 45-59] ANDRZEJ WARMINSKI 47 46 ANDRZEJ WARMINSKI the humanists' conception of "the purpose of criticism-the in- issue, claim spokesmen for contending forces, is the very nature of terpretation, evaluation and enjoyment of serious literature." It is a writing and the future of criticism itself." What are the sides in this system based on a certain reading of Kant in which l'interpretation" war-their weapons, arsenals, and strategies? "On one side of the and "eval~ation,~knowledge and action, epistemology and ethics, pure fray are partisans of the humanistic tradition, who believe that the reason and practical reason, the first and the second Critiques, can purpose of criticism-the interpretation, evaluation and enjoyment of be articulated together thanks to the possibility of knowledge's serious literature-remains unchanged. These critics assume, as phenomenalization in art, the aesthetic, aesthetic judgment. the third William Wordsworth did, that a writer is 'a man speaking to ment-that Critique--thanks to the enjoyment that links the interpretation and literature is a form of communication, held in common by an author evaluation of serious literature-serious because as art it is a and his readers, about something of significance to the human source and a repository of edifying knowledge and value. So, a community. Thus, in the hands of broad-gauged scholars such as certain humanized and humanistic Kant-a Kant conceived in terms of Alfred Kazin and the late Lionel Trilling, the response to literature what Paul de Man in his last work would have called "aesthetic becomes a moral as well as esthetic concern. In Matthew Arnold's ideologyn--provides not only the values worth defending in this war words, criticism should 'propagate the best that is known and thought but also the heavy (ideological) artillery or heavy bombers. And, as in the world.' On the other side are the avatars of a radical approach is the case in all wars, there are casualties: "At Johns Hopkins, the to writing--called deconstruction-that undermines all the humanists' assumptions about the relationships between author and reader, debate over deconstruction wrenched apart the French department, which has since lost many of its tenured members." "Wrenched literature and life. Deconstructionists draw heavily on modem European theories of language and have developed a decidedly apart,' "l~st,~'tenuredmemberstt-the war is depicted as quite conventional with casualties confined to professional soldiers or nihilistic philosophy of life. They argue that all writing is reducible mercenaries (tenured members) with losses,we are led to assume, on to an arbitrary Bequence of linguistic signs or words whose meanings both sides. No civilian targets, no women and children--no untenured have no relationship to the author's intention or to the world outside members or graduate stadents-it would seem, have yet been hit. the text. In this view, Hamlet is not a play about patricide nor does Even if "all out," then, it remains a containable, clean little war (like it dramatize the tragedy of the human condition as understood by a that of the Falkland Islands, say where you can try out all kinds of man named Shakespeare, Instead, it is an impersonal skein of new weapons under real battle conditions) in which there is no linguistic codes and. conventions whose interpretation is open to As such, it is also a anyone who cares to 'deconstruct' the text and 'complete' it by question of escalating to nuclear weapons. short war which can be brought to successful conclusion by the last creating something totally different-a piece of criticism that is in paragraph of the artfcle, meaningfully sub-headed "Meaningt': "Mean- itself a new work of art.n Humanism versus nihilism, humanism and anti-humanism, these are the sides in the war.. Decoding the heavily ing: Philosophically, the debate over deconstruction turns out to be just another round in an old battle between two kinds of humanism- coded characterization of the two sides would take one far. On the level of the individual word, we have an opposition between, on the one that finds human experience rich in meaning and another that one side, words like '%human, "h~manistic,~"man," "tradition," concludes it has none. Great literature has long dramatized both "communication," "common," "community,~~significance,~~nmoral,N outlooks, but deconstruction is a strategy which aims at settling the "concern,"etc., coupled to the somehow reassuring names of Matthew issue beforehand by robbing language of its unique ability to capture Arnold, Wonel Trilling, and Alfred Kazin) and, on the other side, words truth. Fortunately, deconstructed literature cannot match the like "a~atars,~b-adical,~'undermine~,~~eories,~'language," nnihil- wonder of a single well-told story, or a poem's power to make us see istic," "arbitrary," etc., coupled to unnamed Europeans (in the phrase the world afresh." The war turns out not to have been so serious or "European theories of languagen) as impersonal as the skeins of so new after all-just another conventional round of shot in an old linguistic codes and conventions that they would "deconstructn texts battle or just another round in an old humanistic (man to man) boxing into. A whole Anglo-American history (and philosophy) of xenophobia, match. It was, after all, not a case of humanism versus something nativism. and know-nothingism lurks not too far beneath these words other than itself but (one) humanism versus another humanism, and their war. Even more symptomatic is the system that supports humanism against itself. One may believe human experience rich in 48 ANDRZEJ WARMINSKI

meaning, the other may conclude it has none, but neither would question the fundamental humanity of that experience and its easily "experien~e,~"human," "truthmas a property that can be captured and dialectizable oppositions. Both the believers in meaning and the transferred from person to person (providing he is the right, proper, believers in non-meaning-humanists and nihilist, humanist and anti- entitled person and not a robber), that can enter into an economy of humanist--can be classified under meaning, for, after all, if I can say exchange (in which it can be exchanged for other commodities or for that experience has no meaning, I have already mastered that lack of money)--these concepts are clearly inextricable from the metaphors meaning like a Socrates who knows that he does not know (and hence that stage them, express them, translate them, etc. Do these is voted the wisest man by the oracle of Delphi whose motto is "Know metaphors of deconstruction "express" the idea of deconstruction or thyselfM). It is no wonder, then, that what started out as an all-out are the ideas wholly dependent on the metaphors? In not being able war turns out to be only another round in an old battle or, better yet, to state the relation between concept and metaphor only conceptually a local police action against (masked?) robbers who would rob (i.e., without employing metaphors) or onlp meta-metaphorically (for language of "its unique ability to capture truthn Like in a television there is no metaphor that could dominate the entire field of sitcom or a cops and robbers show, all the tensions are relaxed and metaphor), we already begin to enter a different economy-one whose the oppositions are resolved in the end. "The day aftern de- principle Derrida's "White Mythologyn calls the "law of supple- construction and all-out, nuclear war turns out not to be so different mentarity.Un the section "Plus de mdtaphoren-"More and no more from the preceding day. Like nuclear war, deconstruction can be metaphorn--the supplement is the one metaphor too few that is at the staged, dramatized, filmed in terms of the cliches of a disaster movie same time the one metaphor too manyr that is, in any meta- and using the same set and the same, lighting as its predecessors: metaphorical discourse that would attempt to dominate the entire "Skyscraper," MAiirport,mAirplane,m"The Day After," now field of metaphors, there would always be one metaphor too few "Deconstructionn (with MDeconstruction11" and uDeconstruction 111" within the field of metaphors and one metaphor too many outside the shortly to follow). Definitely a low-budget operation. What else field--precisely the one metaphor that the meta-metaphorical dis- would one want from "Deconstruction in Americam--but "Gidget goes course still has to employ to construct itself. If it enters the field to Parisn? of metaphor, the meta-metaphor is no longer masteri if it does not What else? Nothing else. This American movie version of enter the field of metaphor, it does not master the eatire field of deconstruction would re-inscribe it into a balanced, symmetrical metaphors (because it itself is missing from it). This would be one economy of binary opposition, loss and gain without excess or lack. preliminary statement of the law of supplementarity and its strange In the metaphor of the boxing match-"another round in an old battle . economy--an economy not easily recoverable for the plus and minus, . ."-it presupposes two (symmetrical) fighters in one, self-identical more and lees, systems of binary opposition that would characterize ring with lights, rules, a referee, and judges that never change--when deconstructian in terms of an economy in which truth and language it is precisely these presuppositions that deconstruction would (concept and metaphor) in relation to themselves or to one another question. In the metaphor of the robber-"robbing language of its leave nothing over-now that cannot be recovered either by cheap unique ability to capture truthn-it presupposes that language is a dialectics or police action. If there is a single reason for the victorious soldier who has managed to capture truth (or has just obscurantism of reactions to and characterizations of decon- been paid) whom deconstruction waylays in an alley-when de- struction, it is the refusal or inability to understand the law of construction, rather than taking from language what it alrea* has, supplementarity, for example, its economy of less and more, and the demonstrates what has always already been taken from it, better, negative peculiar to it.1 Illustrating this law by examplee could take what it has always already robbed itself of. Rather than our robbing us far into the reading of texts by Derrida (for instance, "White language, we are robbed by language: "We wuz robbedn or "We wuz Mythologyw which stages itself as the statement of this law and its (always already) robbed." These characterizations of deconstruction illustration by examples, or the much unread ending of "Structure, are wrong not only in their conceptual content-they are not true, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," or the text we this is not deconstruction-but in their metaphors. Indeed, these have just heard and its tentative "Definitionn of deconstruction as concepts-and the whole chain of concepts that goes along with them: plus d'une langue: no more one language, more than one language, nplus" of a language, etc.-supplement of language) and de Man (for ANDRZEJ WARMINSKI 51

50 ANDRZEJ WARMINSKI The holily mourning (one)? instance the essay on Proust in Allegories of Reading). To econ- Heideggerls entire project pivots on a re-interpretation of the poem's omize, we will stick to one exemplary reading which gathers the stark, abrupt, opening "Not.@ Indeed, says Heidegger, "This 'Not them themes and problematics of "Deconstruction in America" around one . . .' with which our poem begins, is a decision of time (Zeftent- question: that of undecidability. scheidung) in the sense of the original time of the peoplesn (HH, 511.4 One could say, then, that the question of the poem comes down to 11. Heidegger Reading Hijlderlin whether Heidegger can-whether we can, since the time decided by the poem is our time-get past the first word of the poem. Hiso - An oblique route may take us to the question faster. The complicated attempt to do so, his re-interpretation of the Not, of the reading is that of Hiilderlin by Heidegger: the HBlderlin who, refusal of the old, dead, Greek gods, is worth re-tracing. according to Paul de Man's 1955 essay, says exactly the opposite of The re-interpretation begins with a determination of the what Heidegger makes him say but who nevertheless talks of the "grounding mood~(C~ndstimmung)of the poem on the he basis of the same thing (though in an opposite sense). In the end.2 what %olily mourningn (das Heiligtrauede) heart of the opening lines: Heideggerls reading of Hiilderlin comes down to is the question of the the mood is holy mourning Qleilige Trauer). What does it mean? "Not" (Nicht): that is, whether Hiilderlinls double lack and "double wHolymourning" is not some sentimental, subjective sadness or like Notn-"the no longer (Nichtmehr) of the gods who have fled and the not physical pain--as we know from Sein und Zeit, this is not what yet (Nochnicht) of the coming god"3--are to be understood in terms of Heidegger means by mood--but rather something essentially other Heidegger's fundamental ontological Not (based on the "Nothing" (HH, 82). This otherness is specifically determined by a three-fold [Nichts]). (Or, in other words, is the presence and absence of the "not5 the %oly mourningn is not 1) a despairing giving up of the old (Greek) gads in Hiilderlinls poetry the same thing as--dae Selbe and gods, indeed, as the first strophe says, these gods remain loved too not das Qeiche-as the concealment and dis-concealment of Being, much by the "1" of the poem-that is, the mourning does not exhaust i.e., is it to be thought in terms of the ontological difference between itself in a sterile independence of the subject; nor 2) is it a rootless Being and beings, Sefn and Seides?) Is there an Notw in giving oneself up to the gods who have fled-that Is, the mourning is Hiildeilin's poetry? Perhaps the best place to begin reading the not a losing of the subject in the object; nor 3) is it a refusal of both "other Note--of HBlderlin and of Heidegger-is the late hymn 1) and 2)-that is, the mourning is not an empty hovering between "Germanien," to which Heidegger devotes one hundred and fifty pages subject and object but rather "founds a new relation to the gods" in the lectures from the Wintersemester 1934-35. Appropriately (HH, 61). This three-fold "not" is what makes the mourning how it enough, this poem that, according to Heidegger, is the perfect is not contingent and not poetic decoration, but "rather in it beginning (because it leads into the origin) begins with a Not-an something groundtngiy essential is poetically said about Being pure apparent negation whose "objectn is the Greek gads: and simple (Ubr das Seyn schlechthin)" (HH, 90). In short, if the essential otherness of the holy mourning is that of Being, then this Nicht sie, die Seeligen, die erschienen sind, grounding mood of the poem is an ontological category like the mood Die Giitterbilder in dem alten Lande, of dread (Angst) in Being and Time and "What is Metaphysics?" And Sie darf ich ja nicht rufen mehr, wenn aber like the mood of Angst, which because it is fear of nothhg rather Ihr heimatlichen Wasserl jetzt mit euch than of something, discloses the Nothing, the Mchts, the mood of holy Dee Herzens Liebe klagt, was will es anders mourning, because it is a mourning over the present absence of the Das Heiligtrauernde? old Greek gods rather than over their (past) presence, discloses the Not, the Nicht. Hence the opening words, rather than any kind of Not them, the blessed, who once appeared, refusal of the old gods or a nostalgic hanging onto them, are a Those images of gods in the ancient land, recovering of the old gods in their absence, or, better, "the Them I may no longer call, but if, preservation of the divinity of the old gods in the mourning You waters of the homeland, now with you The love of my heart laments, what else does it want, ANDRZEJ WARMINSKI 5 3

possible new meeting with the gods" (HH, 96-97). Rather than a despairing or facile refusal of the old gods, the poem's opening-read in the context of verses 5 and 19-would be the highest decisiveness, ANDRZEJ WARMINSKI a mourning that is a knowledge of the gods who have fled as fled, and hereby a will to a possible new meeting of, with, the gods. (%A No renunciation of themn (HH, 93). [Alles Nein]," says the "Letter on Humanism," "is only the affirmation Heidegger's ontologization of H81derlints "Notn (Nicht) and of the Not fistnur die Bejahung des Nicht] .") Perhaps here Heidegger "other" (andere) can be traced to its (textual) source in the pages he could be more easily accused of "nostalgia" than in "Hglderlin and the devotes to an extensive interpretation of the poem's opening. After Essence of Poetry" (for which the "Germanien" lectures are clearly a the determination of the poem's grounding mood as holy mourning (the Vorstudiurn), for it would seem that the meeting we are awaiting is "holily mourning~eart),we can say the first strophe again with a with the same old gods (whereas in "Hiilderlin and the Essence of now clearer knowledge, says Heidegger (HH, 96). who then quotes the Poetrywere is an asymmetry between gods past and god to come). entire first strophe (again), and comments: "Now we read nothing Nevertheless, we have to remember that I) it is a new meeting more of a refusal. We also gather that it is not at all a question of (Neubegegnuag) with the gods, and, more important, that 2) it is not a an external historical comparison of a previous state of the old world presence that is mourned here but rather a present absence whose and the attitude to it with a later and contemporary world, not a negativity is interpreted ontologically. Small wonder, then, that the question of humanism, but rather what holds sway here is the time of Wghest decisiveness [or decidedness] Mchste Entscbiedenheit) of the peoples, and in question is the global destiny of the native earth" this holy mourning-what we come up against under the name (ZIH, 96). The effacement of the opening "Notn could not be more llHiilderlin"--puts us into the decision (Deshalb stellt er in die explicit-now we read nothing more of a Not. we could paraphrastr &tscheid@. but Heidegger makes it so: %ut not only does nothing of a refusal But such an understanding of the "Not of the Not-f happen in the first strophe. The 'Not' with which it begins is basically Heideggerls "poet of the poet" is nevertheless not yet a reading: how not at all an isolated negation, also not a renunciation, but rather does Heidegger efface, erase, re-write the poem's opening Not? If I...]" (HH, 96). A peculiar torturing of language takes place here: the Not finde "its proper, full meaningVseine eigentUche volle not only does not a not happen in the first strophe. we could rewrite Bedeutung) in line five-"what else does it want?"-then what does (Nicht nur nichts vcm tinem Nicht geschieht in der ersten Strophe . . this verse want? What does Heidegger want in reading the Not into .?). If not only not a Not, what then? Heidegger's response is worth it? In fact, Heidegger reads into it not only the Not but also the following to the end: "The 'Not' I...) rather finds its authentic lor entire poem (indeed all of Htilderlin's poetry and all of poetry if we proper] full meaning (seine eigentllchc volle Fkdeutung) in the 'what keep in mind Hiilderlln's decisive exemplary position as the founder of else does it want* (verse 51, the holily mourning heart. We have "an other historyn): "Only when we measure the entire self-secured already pointed to the beginning of the second stroyhe aria stated breadth of this holy mourning, which pushes away everything forced, that, yes, the gods have themselves fled and hence a refusal of them do we meet and understand the deciding word (das mtscbeidende is not necessary. With that, however, we do not broach the true Wort) of the entire first strophe and thereby of the entire poem" (HH, import of the second strophe and its inner relation to the first. 94). This "deciding word" (das entscbeidende Wort), this "essential Rather we have to hold together in one both verse 5 and verse 19, word" (das wesentliche Wort) (HH, 96). the word that turns "Not" to 'what else does it want1 with 'Nothing do I want to deny here and "Not" (of Being), "othern to "othern (of Being), beginning into origin, nothing do I want to plead for.' This line is the highest decisiveness what does it say? As It turns out, this "wordn does not say anything (hadrste ffitschiedenheit), namely the taking over of the abandonment but asks (or does not ask?) a question: I1The word has the linguistic by the old gods. The grounding mood of holy mourning intensifies form of the question and runs (verse 5): . . . what else does it want- itself here to its innermost dominance. The mourning becomes a it, the holily mourning heart. According to the usual character- knowledge that the true taking earnestly of the gods who have fled as ization of forms of speech one can find here a so-called rhetorical those who have fled is in itself precisely an awaiting of the gods, question, a saying which despite having the form of a question is no namely of their godliness as no longer fulfilled. The wanting-nothing- more and pleading-for-nothing is not the fall into a crude godlessness and an empty despair, no idle and clever coming to terms with death, rather thls wanting is the wanting of verse 5Jwhat else does it want+ turning into and pure self-maintaining in the space of a ANDRZEJ WARMINSKI 55

ANDRZEJ WARMINSKI unchanged, I am afraid, for deadly I And scarcely permitted it is to awaken the dead (Dem euer sdtliines Angesicht zu sehn, als wlrs, wie question but rather an answering and assuring, the statement of a smst, ich fiircht' es, tiidtlich ists, I lfnd kaum erlaubt, Gestorbene certainty and decidedness (Das Wort hat die sprachliche Form der zu weken).* In other words, the gods who appeared then are now, for Frage und lautet (V.5): . . . was will es anfers-es, das heilig us, dead not because they no longer appear but because for us, now, trauernde Hem. Nach der ablichen Kermreicbnuog der Redeform they carmot appear: that is, in the mode of Greek, mimetic kann man hier eine sogenannte rhetoriscbe Frage ffnden, ein Sagen, representation, in the mode of appearance (erscheinen), images das trots der Frageform keine Frage, sondern ein Antworten und (Bilder), etc. In short, perhaps the question is indeed asking for Versichern, der Spruch einer Sicherheit und Fntschiedenheit ist)" "other gods," whom it would be more appropriate to call (rufen): that (HH, 94-95). Although Heidegger seems to dismiss the "linguistic is, gods who can be called by a calling that is not a calling of images formn--a question, and, at that, a "so-called rhetorical questionn--of of seen (literally or figuratively) gods but a calling of, as it were, his "deciding wordn (as though because it were a question of merely heard gods, a calling of calling. What other gods these could be and linguistic form it could be effaced and re-written [like a question how they could be other is the question of the poem. Trying to mark, say] again and again), it is clear that he exploits this form and tlanswer%this question-as though one could answer and as though we "the usual characterization of forms of speechn to the full: that is, had not already answered (here and elsewhere)-would lead us too far he reads the question figuratively, as a rhetorical question (une away from (and too far into) the poem, but the implications (for question de pure forme, as one might say h French). Rather than Hblderlin and for Heidegger) can be Indicated. The problem is not asking What else?"the question is really saying "Nothing elsen* "The just that a literal reading of the question triggers another, opposed, no longer being able to call the old gods, this self-submission to reading of the poeml.e., it is not just that the poem is, as one says, "ambiguous"--but rather that 1) the two readings, figurative and renunciation, what else is it-it 4s , nothing else (was ist es anderes-es iet nichts anderes)-but the only possible resolved literal, are mutually exclusive (better mutually parasitical)-the one readiness for the awaiting of the godly [...In (HH, 95). It is this reading is precisely the error denounced by the other and has to be decision to read figuratively that allows Heidegger to re-write the undone by itn5 (as Paul de Man puts it): "Nothiog but them . . . " llNot" into Wot Not," as it were, and to take it (along with verse 19) as versus "Not them . . . "-and are not reconcilable, not mediatable the Wghest decidedness." And it is no use saying that Heidegger's (either by dialectics or by ontology), because 2) the difference Nichts comes before, is ontologically prior to, the question of literal between them is radically undecidable. There is no way to decide and figurative, for here the decision of the question (Iiteral/figura- whether the poem is really asking or not asking for something else tive?) comes before-i.e., in terms of a temporality of reading and not because the poem "ItselfVs not itself, it is divided against itself and a temporality of the destiny of the forgetting of Being-indeed, founds does not know whether it is asking for something else or for more of (and confounds) the question of the "Nothing" (Nichts). the same. And the appeal to *tone"or "contexta) is of no help here Now the (first) problem with such a reading of the Not is that because as Heidegger has so eloquently demonstrated, it is precisely the question "what else does it want?," "what other does it want?," this question that decides the tone, the mood (Stimmung), of the poem can, of course, also be taken literally as "what else is there?-at in the first place; and if the question is itself undecidable so is the is, as asking what else beside calling fen) the mere images of the tone or context by means of which we had hoped to decide the gods who appeared-gods who precisely because they appeared cannot question. In short, precisely the word, the phrase, that Heidegger be our gods because our culture is a response to a different, other calls the 'deciding word" of the poem is itself undecidable, and thus nature from that of the Greeks. (Again, in the terms of H61derlinqs reproduces an other (de-ontologized) Not that cannot be effaced, that famous letter to Bmendorff, our nature is Greek culture ["clarity reproduces itself mechanically by selfpuotation (which can never be of representation," "Junonian sobriety"J; and Greek nature is the quotation of a self or a subject) like something merely recited by Oriental culture ("the fire from heaven,"holy pathos".) This would heart or repeated. Rather than putting us into the decision be one possible reason why the 'IIMof the poem's opening fears that it "H6lderlin"puts us into radical (i.e., subjectless, Being-less) is fatal, deathly, to see the beautiful countenance of the gods as undecidability. though they were unchanged (as if now were then: als wilrs, wie sonst): To look upon your beautiful brows, as though / They were ANDRZEJ WARMINSKI 57

rather a gap between meaning, the horizon of meaning, the grounding mood, the semantic pole, rhetoric . . . on the one hand, and the linguistic form of the question, syntax, grammar on the other--a gap, in short, between the meaning of words and the order of words, between the word as carrier of meaning and the word as place-holder or "syntactical plug." The question "what else does it want?" stands 56 ANDRZEJ WARMINSKI in the place of this gap-it makes a hole, as it were, in the text--and it is its status as mere place-holder, non-signifying syntactical plug, To summarize, let us retrace Heidegger1s interpretation of the that interferes with its semantic function as carrier of meaning. question "what else does it want?" step by step in order to mark This mutual, asymmetrical interferenceand not its lexical richness, better how our reading of the question as undecidable diverges from polysemy, or ambiguity--is what renders the question truly un- Heidegger's path. Heidegger's effort is an attempt to efface the decidable in de Man's or Derrida's sense: undecidability is "e opening "NotQf the poem, to read "Not them" as "Precisely them," irreducible excess of the syntactic over the semantic." ("Its Wothing but them," or Not "Not them." His interpretation ac- semantic void signifies, but it signifies spacing and articulation! it complishes this on the basis of what he calls the grounding mood of has as its meaning the possibility of syntax; it orders the play of holy mourning. This grounding mood (the mood of the ground) is an meaning. Neither purely syntactic nor rely semantic, it marks the ontological category--like the mood of dread in Being and Time-and it articulated opening of that opposition.'^ And it is undecidtbility in provides the horizon of understanding against which the poem is to be this "senseWat always comes to interfere with Heideggergs attempt read. It is the pre-understanding of the poem. The question "what to reduce H81derlin1s syntax to ontological semantics, to questions of else does it want?I1 is first read against the background of this meaning that have nothing (ontological lfNothingn)to do with questions horizon, in terms of the mood of holy mourning. But, on the other of pure linguistic form, grammar, syntax. One could say that hand, the grounding mood of holy mourning is read on the basis of this lllinguistic form," syntax-and the necessity to dismiss it as ontic- question: that is, on the basis of the question read as not really a mark an irreducible, necessary remainder of the technical, of question but as an assertiveness and decidedness (das entscbidende Technik, in any language, not matter how "ontologized," as language. Wort), in short, as a rhetorical question. Heidegger is explicit about A helpful interpretation of Heidegger on language and this, but he dismisses the question of reading as only a question of grammar can help us to summarize this point: "It is possible to linguistic foma purely ontic concern, the ontic aspect of language, distinguish between an ontic and an ontological aspect of language, one could say. The circle in Heidegger's reading is explicit: the even if such a dfstinction disrupts the fundamental unity of the reading of the question as rhetorical is decided on the basis of the language phenomenon. The grammar of language, Heidegger sug- grounding mood, the grounding mood is decided on the basis of the gests, corresponds to its ontic, the words to its ontological reading of the question as rhetorical. And this is not some dimension. Language can do justice to Being only if it is possible to hermeneutic circle of part and whole but an ontologized circle of pre- free it from the bondage of grammar." Why so? "Grammar and logic understanding and understanding based on the dstential structure place the word into a linguistic or logical space which threatens to of Dasein's self-understanding: its always already being concerned obscure its meaning. There is a tendency to interpret the word with the question of the meaning of Being (Cf. Being and Time, section entirely in terms of the context in which it appears. To learn what a 32). But what we are saying is that this circle is broken by reading. word means, one should, according to this view, ask how it is used, First of all, the question "what else does it want?" can also be read how it operates within a given language. This brings us back to the literally, and such a reading would give rise to an other history, one example of the blind man, making the judgment: The sky is blue. The which plays itself out not as a story of us and them, of us and the grammatical approach would have difficulty in finding anything wrong Greeks, but as a story of usltheml and their them, Hesper- with this judgment. And yet, it is quite clear that the sentence when iansIGreeksland Egyptians (or the Orient). In such a history, the spoken by a blind man is only repetition rather than response to the Greeks would be the name of a radical disjunction between us and. .. call of Being. The grammatical approach falls to do justice to the ourselves, the Egyptians (because, according to H81derlin1s letter to BBhlendorff, the relation of nature and culture for us and for the Egyptians is the "samen). I have read H61derlints other history elsewhere.6 For my purposes here, it is more important that this (always possible) other literal reading is only the sign of a gap inscribed in the question: a gap not (just) between one (literal) meaning and another (figurative) meaning (masterable by a suf- ficiently rigorous hermeneutics that can hold both together) but ANDRZEJ WARhlINSKI

4All references marked as HH are to: Martin Heidegger, Hiilderlins Hymnen 'Germanien' un 'Der Rhein' (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1980). This is volume 39 of the Gesamt- ausgabe. 5~aul-de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale Uni- 58 ANDRZEJ WARMINSKI versity Press, 1979), p. 12. 61n "Endpapers: Hiilderlin's Textual Historytt and "H81derlin in problem of meaning. The demand to free language from grammar is a France," Studies in Romanticism (Summer 1983). Both essays will demand to free it for its real task of revealing meaning. The context appear in: Readings in Interpretation: H6lderIii1, Hegel, Heidegger, in which a word operates should not be permitted to obscure its 7~11the quotations about undecidability and syntax are from: essential meaning.It8 What we are saying, in short, is that the Jacques Derrida, "The Double Sessi~n,~~in Dissemination trans. grammar of language (in a broad sense) makes us all blind men, that Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. the failure "to do justice to the problem of meaning" is a necessary, 219-222. constitutive failure of language-a failure, one should add, that is 8~arstenHarries, "The Search for Meaning," in: George almost the sole "themeQf HBlderlints poetry9--a failure that pays no Schrader, ed., Eaistentialist Philosophers: Kierkegaard to Mer- attention to our "demand to free langua'ge from grammar"and that IeauQonty (New York: McGraw-Hill , 1967), pp. 197-198. has nothing (a linguistic "nothing" here) to do with our permitting or 9Cf. Andrzej Warminski,ttlPatmost: The Senses of Interpreta- not permitting it to "obscure essential meaning." tion," MLN (April 19761, also in Readings in Interpretation: Hiilderlin, It may be good to remember that the word nDeconstruction" is Hegel. Heidegger. also subject to this "failure,"it is always a place-holder as well as a carrier of meaning: overdetermined, in process, not one, in America.

Andrzej Warminski Yale University

NOTES

lThis holds, I would say, from the most trivializing journalistic efforts all the way to the most "advanced" humanist, Marxist, or nouveau pragmatist attempts to characterize (and dismiss) decon- struction. For a pragmatist refusal to read the supplement, see Richard Rorty, "Deconstruction and Circumvention,* Critical Inquiry, Volume 11, Number 1 (September 1984). Rortyts characterization of the "dilemma" that Derrida purportedly has to face entails statements like "You can't have a ground without a figure, a margin without a textn (p. lobwhen Derridals whole project could be read as an attempt to undo (and re-inscribe) the dialectical logic of such a "without," to say that there is indeed nothing but-s,upplementary "nothingtt-"a margin without a page of text." 2The remarks that follow are a much condensed version of the final pages of a longer essay called "Heidegger Reading H61derlintt to appear in: Andrzej Warminski, Readings in Interpretation: Hiikler- lin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 3Martin Heidegger, "Holderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung," in ErTuterungen zu Holderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1971), p. 47.